What usually happens is that on Friday afternoons a percentage of Pod C’s revenue officers meet for Happy Hour cocktails at Meibeyer’s. As is the case with most of the north side’s taverns that serve as Service hangouts, Happy Hour at Meibeyer’s lasts exactly sixty minutes and features drink specials that are indexed to the approximate cost of gasoline and vehicle depreciation involved in the 2.3-mile drive from the REC to the Southport-474 interchange. Different levels and Pods tend to congregate at different places, some of which are downtown and ape in various ways the more stylized venues of Chicago and St. Louis. The Bell Shaped Men can be found nearly every evening at Father’s, which is right there on Self-Storage Parkway and owned outright by the area’s Budweiser distributor; its function is less social than intubatory. Many of the wigglers, on the other hand, frequent the steroidal college bars around PCB and Bradley. Homosexuals have the Wet Spot in the downtown arts district. Most of the examiners with children, of course, go home to spend time with their family, although Steve and Tina Geach are often at Meibeyer’s together for Friday’s 2-H. Nearly everyone finds it necessary to blow off some of the unvented steam that’s accreted during a week of extreme tedium and concentration, or extreme volume and stress, or both.
Meibeyer’s has ash-gray laminate paneling, electric tiki torches whose origins are unknown but may date from a past incarnation, a Wurlitzer 412-C jukebox, two pinball machines, a foosball table and an air hockey game, and a small darts area prudently set off apart near the little hallway for the pay phone and restrooms. Meibeyer’s broad windows overlook Southport’s highway-side franchises and the complicated exits of the I-474 overpass. There’s been the same Friday bartender for at least the past three years, according to Chuck Ten Eyck. Drinks are somewhat expensive because Service employees do not, as a rule, drink very much or fast, even at Happy Hour, which affects what the tavern has to charge for drinks in order to stay solvent. In winter weather Meibeyer’s plows its own lot with a bladed pickup. In the summer, the bar’s neon sign, which features the semion of a disembodied trilby whose angle changes twice a second, is reflected off something unapparent before it and appears faintly, reflected at least twice, in the tavern’s front windows. Meibeyer’s brim goes up and down against the malarial light of a gathering dusk in which shelving clouds and a spike in humidity only sometimes mean real rain that hits the ground.
Being mainly single, heterosexual transfers and replacements fall right into this groove. Robby van Noght comes a lot, though not this Friday. Gerry Moeller has been here all five weeks he’s been posted at the REC. Harriet Candelaria comes but nearly always leaves after one round whenever Beth Rath happens to bring Meredith Rand, with whom Candelaria has problems that none of the transfers has the slightest inkling of the origins of. Steve and Tina Geach, who work in different groups and have different break rotations, and who are very devoted to each other and by general consensus have the sort of marriage that increases the attraction and credibility of marriage a great deal for people who are wired to be in such a close, enduring relation, always arrive together in their rust-ruddled VW microbus, and sit close together, always consuming the very same type and brand of beverage, and usually leaving the moment the bell rings for Happy Hour’s end, often showing an odd ability to embrace and walk at the same time without looking clumsy. Chris Acquistipace and Russell Nugent, Dave Witkiewicz, Joe Biron-Maint, Nancy Johnson, Chahla (‘the Iranian Crisis’) Neti-Neti, Howard Shearwater, Frank Brown, Frank Friedwald, and Frank De Chellis haven’t missed a Meibeyer’s Happy Hour night since their posting. Dale Gastine sometimes brings a date. Keith Sabusawa now always brings Shane (‘Mr. X’) Drinion, the UTEX transfer with whom Sabusawa now rooms at Angler’s Cove in a suite with two other transfers who never seem to come to Meibeyer’s. Schedule F specialists like Chris Fogle and Herb Dritz bat about .500 in terms of attendance. Chuck Ten Eyck and ‘Second-Knuckle’ Bob McKenzie (both at Peoria REC the longest) are reliable as iron and always seem to want to somehow preside. R. L. Keck and Thomas Bondurant usually come. Toni Ware and Beth Rath nearly always drop by, and, as mentioned, some of the time Beth Rath brings the legendarily attractive but not universally popular Meredith Rand. Rath and Rand work adjoining Tingle tables in Sabusawa’s group, which is tasked to utility/overflow, and the two are confidantes. Drinion, who has no vehicle, must remain as long as Sabusawa stays and no longer. According to Sabusawa, the UTEX from La Junta CA has no problem with this, and his response to Sabusawa’s invitations to come along to Meibeyer’s after shift change is always either ‘All right’ or ‘Why not.’ Meredith Rand’s deal is that she tends to come only if her husband is somehow stuck at work or out of town on business. Like Drinion, she doesn’t seem to have her own vehicle or even a driver’s license. Sometimes she catches a ride home from Meibeyer’s with Beth Rath but more often gets picked up by her husband, whom she apparently calls from the Pod in advance to say where she’ll be, and whom no one in Meibeyer’s has ever met but always simply pulls up into the lot and toots the horn for Meredith Rand, who in turn often starts gathering her things a minute or two before the car horn sounds, rather (according to Nancy Johnson) like a dog that can hear the pitch of its master’s approaching engine and assumes its position at the home’s window long before the master’s car heaves into view. She has been at Meibeyer’s for the last five weeks running, which implies that her husband has been working late or on the road a great deal. According to Sabusawa, no one knows what he does.
It is not difficult to see the way the energy and dynamics of the Pod C table change when Meredith Rand is present for Happy Hour at Meibeyer’s. In many respects, it’s a phenomenon that happens at bars, taverns, and grills everywhere when a woman of sufficient prettiness appears. Meredith Rand is one of only a handful of females at the REC that every male with an opinion on such matters agrees is totally, wrist-bitingly attractive. Beth Rath is far from homely, but Meredith Rand is a whole different order. Meredith Rand has bottomless green eyes and exquisite facial bone structure and a creamy poreless complexion with almost no lines or signs of wear, and a great cataract of curly dark-blond hair that, according Sabusawa, when worn down and allowed to frame her face and shoulders has been known to produce facial tics even in gay or otherwise asexual men. She is a cut of pure choice prime, is the consensus, not always unspoken. Her entry into any sort of Service social setting produces palpable changes, especially in males. The specifics of these sorts of changes are familiar enough to everyone not to spend time enumerating. Suffice it that Meredith Rand makes the Pod’s males self-conscious. They thus tend to become either nervous and uncomfortably quiet, as though they were involved in a game whose stakes have suddenly become terribly high, or else they become more voluble and conversationally dominant and begin to tell a great many jokes, and in general appear deliberately unself-conscious, whereas before Meredith Rand had arrived and pulled up a chair and joined the group there was no real sense of deliberateness or even self-consciousness among them. Female examiners, in turn, react to these changes in a variety of ways, some receding and becoming visually smaller (like Enid Welch and Rachel Robbie Towne), others regarding Meredith Rand’s effect on men with a sort of dark amusement, still others becoming narrow-eyed and prone to hostile sighs or even pointed departures (q.v. Harriet Candelaria). Some of the male examiners are, by the second round of pitchers, performing for Meredith Rand, even if the performance’s core consists of making a complex show of the fact that they are not performing for Meredith Rand or even especially aware that she’s at the table. Bob McKenzie, in particular, becomes almost manic, addressing nearly every comment or quip to the person on either the right or left side of Meredith Rand, but never once addressing her or appearing even to look at her. Since Beth Rath is usually one of the people on either the right or left side of Meredith Rand, McKenzie’s habit of doing this tends visibly to either annoy or depress Rath, depending on her mood.
For the past four weeks, really only Shane Drinion has seemed unaffected by the presence of a terribly attractive woman. Granted, it’s not clear to anyone just what Drinion is affected by. The other transfers from La Junta CA (Sandy Krody, Gil Haight) describe him as a very solid Fats and S corp examiner but a total lump in terms of personality, possibly the dullest human being currently alive. Drinion tends to sit very quiet and self-contained at his place with his hand around a glass of Michelob (which is what’s on tap at Meibeyer’s), his face expressionless unless someone tells a joke that’s somehow directed at everyone around the table, at which time Drinion will smile briefly and then his face will go back to being expressionless. But not expressionless in a glazed or catatonic way. He watches whoever is speaking very intently. Actually, intently isn’t even the right word. There is no particular kind of study in his gaze; he just gives whoever’s speaking his complete attention. His bodily movements, which are minimal, give the suggestion of being clipped and precise without being fussy or prissy. He will respond to a question or comment directed explicity to him, but other than these rare times he is not one of the people who speaks. But he’s not one of these people who shrinks or recedes in groups until he’s barely there. There’s no sense that he’s shy or inhibited. He’s there but in an unusual way; he becomes part of the table’s environment, like the air or ambient light. It’s ‘Second-Knuckle’ Bob McKenzie and Chuck Ten Eyck who’ve conferred on Drinion the name ‘Mr. X,’ short for ‘Mr. Excitement.’
At one Happy Hour in June things eventuate such that Drinion and Meredith Rand are left alone together at the table, more or less right across from each other, at the part of the evening when a lot of the other examiners have left for home or other venues. But they’re both still there. Meredith Rand is evidently waiting for a pickup from her husband, who is said to possibly be some kind of medical student. Keith Sabusawa and Herb Dritz are once again playing foosball while Beth Rath (who rather likes Sabusawa; they go all the way back to the IRS Training Center in Columbus) watches with her arms crossed and a More-brand cigarette going in one hand.
So they’re sitting alone at the table. Shane Drinion seems to be neither nervous nor not to be sitting alone opposite the galvanic Meredith Rand, with whom he’s exchanged not one direct word since his posting in late April. Drinion looks directly at her, but not in the challenging or smoldering way of a Keck or Nugent. Meredith Rand has had two gin and tonics and is on her third, slightly more to drink than normal but has not yet smoked. Like most married examiners, she wears both an engagement ring and a wedding band. She looks back at him, though it’s not as if they’re staring into each other’s eyes or anything. Drinion’s expression could be called pleasant in the way that certain kinds of weather are called pleasant. He is on either his first or second glass of Michelob from one of the pitchers that’s still on the table, some not wholly empty. Rand has asked Drinion one or two innocuous questions about his origins. The thing about the Kansas Youth Authority orphanage seems to interest her, or else it’s just the flat candor with which Drinion says he spent much of his childhood in an orphanage. Rand tells Drinion a brief childhood vignette about her going to a girlfriend’s house and their using their hands and feet to climb up inside doorjambs and remain there high up in the jambs splayed and as if framed, though later on she will not be able to remember the reason for telling this anecdote or any of the context behind it. She does notice, almost right away, the same thing that Sabusawa and many of the other examiners have noticed—which is that although Drinion seems only partly socially present in a large gathering, there is a very different quality to any kind of tête-à-tête with him; he has the quality of being easy or good to talk to, which is an attribute for which there is no good single word in English, which is slightly odd, although so is whatever is good about talking to Drinion, since he possesses nothing that could be called charm or social grace or even evident compassion. He is, as Rand will say later to Beth Rath (though not to her husband), a very odd bird indeed. There is a brief exchange that Meredith Rand won’t remember so well, involving Drinion’s being an itinerant examiner and the REC and Examinations and the Service in general, i.e., Rand: ‘You like the work?’ which it seems to take Drinion a moment or two to process. D: ‘I think I don’t like it or dislike it either.’ R: ‘Well, is there something else you’d rather be doing?’ D: ‘I don’t know. I don’t have any experience doing anything else. Wait. That’s not true. I worked in a supermarket three evenings a week between the ages of sixteen and eighteen. I would not prefer working in a supermarket to what I’m doing now.’ R: ‘It sure doesn’t pay as well.’ D: ‘I put things on shelves and affixed small adhesive price tags to them. There wasn’t much to it.’ R: ‘Sounds boring.’ D: ‘…’
‘We look like we’re having a tête-à-tête’ is the first thing that Meredith Rand will later be able to remember clearly having said to Shane Drinion.
‘That’s a foreign term for a private conversation,’ Drinion responds.
‘Well, I don’t know how private it is.’
Drinion looks at her, but not in the way of someone who’s not sure what to say in reply. One thing about him is that he’s completely the same, affectwise and demeanorwise, by himself as he is in a large group. If he gave off a sound it would be like a single long tone from a tuning fork or EKG flatline instead of anything that varies.
‘You know,’ Meredith Rand says, ‘if you want to know the truth, you kind of interest me.’
Drinion looks at her.
‘I’m guessing you don’t hear that a lot,’ Meredith Rand says. She gives a little bit of a dry smile.
‘It’s a compliment, that you find me of interest.’
‘I guess it is, isn’t it,’ Rand says, smiling again. ‘For one thing, it’s that I could say something like that, that there’s something sort of interesting about you, without you thinking I’m coming on to you.’
Drinion nods, one hand around the base of his glass. He is very still, Meredith Rand notices. He doesn’t fidget or change positions in his chair. He’s a bit of a mouth-breather; his mouth hangs slightly open. With some people the mouth hanging open thing makes them look not too bright.
‘For instance,’ she says, ‘imagine if I said something like that to “2K” Bob, how he’d react.’
‘All right.’
Something goes slightly opaque for a moment in Shane Drinion’s eyes, and Meredith can tell he is literally doing it, imagining her saying ‘I find you interesting’ to Second-Knuckle Bob McKenzie. ‘What would his reaction be, do you think?’
‘Do you mean his outer, visible reaction or his inner reaction?’
‘The visible one I kind of don’t even want to imagine,’ Meredith Rand says.
Drinion nods. He is, it is true, not all that interesting to look at, in terms of looks. His head is somewhat smaller than average, and very round. No one’s seen him in any sort of hat or coat yet; it’s always a white dress shirt and sweater vest. His hairline is receding in a way that makes his forehead seem elaborate. There are some pimple scars around his temple areas. His face isn’t very defined or structured; his nostrils are two different sizes or shapes, she can see, which is usually bad news for how good-looking someone is. His mouth is slightly too small for the width of his face. His hair is that dull or waxy kind of dark blond that sometimes goes with a reddish complexion and not the greatest skin. He’s the sort of person you’d have to look at very intently even to be able to describe. Meredith Rand has been looking expectantly at him.
‘You’re asking me to describe what I believe his inner reaction might be?’ Drinion says. His face at least isn’t quite the same abraded-looking red when they’re not in the fluorescence of the Pod, a reddishness in people that for some reason always depresses Meredith Rand first thing in the morning.
‘Let’s say I’m curious.’
‘Well, I don’t know for certain. When I was imagining it, my impression was that he’d be frightened.’
There’s a slight change in Meredith Rand’s posture, but she keeps her facial expression very neutral. ‘How come?’
‘My impression is that he’s frightened of you. This is just my impression. It’s hard to explain out loud.’ He stops for a moment. ‘Your attractiveness presents McKenzie with some kind of test that he is afraid he won’t pass. He’s anxious about this. When others are around and he can act out a role, he can go into an adrenalized state that makes him forget he’s afraid. No, that’s not right.’ Drinion pauses again for a moment. He doesn’t look frustrated, though. ‘My sense is that the adrenaline of performing makes the fear feel like excitement. In this type of setting, he can feel as though you excite him. That’s why he acts so excited and pays so much attention to you, but he knows that others are watching,’ Drinion concludes and takes a sip of Michelob; the motion of his arm is very nearly right-angled without being stiff or robotic. There is a precision and economy of movement about him. Meredith Rand has noticed this also during work hours, when she stretches and looks around as a kind of break and looks over and sees Drinion sitting and removing staples and moving different forms into different piles at his Tingle table. His posture is very good without being stiff or rigid. He looks like a man whose back and neck never hurt. He appears confused, or speculative. ‘Fear and excitement seem to be closely related.’
‘Ten Eyck and Nugent do the same thing, though, when the whole table’s going at it like that,’ Rand says.
Drinion nods in a slightly off way that indicates that’s not quite what she has asked to talk about. It’s not the same as his registering impatience, though. ‘In a private, tête-à-tête conversation with you, though, my impression is that he would feel the fear more as real fear. He wouldn’t like being directly conscious of this. Of feeling it. He wouldn’t be sure what it was even fear of. He would be on edge, confused, in a way that could not be made to feel like excitement. If you told him that you found him interesting, I believe he would not know what to say. He would not know how he was supposed to act. I think not knowing this would make Bob very uncomfortable.’
Drinion looks at her steadily for a moment. His face, which is a bit oily, tends to shine in the fluorescence of the Examination areas, though less so in the windows’ indirect light, the shade of which indicates that clouds have piled up overhead, though this is just Meredith Rand’s impression, and one not wholly conscious.
‘You’re pretty observant,’ Meredith Rand says.
Drinion replies: ‘I don’t know that that’s true. I don’t think I have any direct observation or fact-pattern to base this on. It’s a guess. But my guess, for some reason, is that he might actually burst into tears.’
Meredith Rand looks suddenly pleased, which almost literally lights up her face. She reaches out and pats the table smartly with the fingers of one hand. ‘I think you’re right.’
‘Somehow it’s awful to contemplate.’
‘I think he might fall out of his chair and run away crying and flapping his hands hysterically in the air.’
Drinion says, ‘That I couldn’t guess at one way or the other. I do know that you dislike him. I know he makes you feel uncomfortable.’
Drinion is facing Meibeyer’s front windows, Meredith Rand the tavern’s rear section, where there is the hallway and darts area and a decorative display of different types of formal or business-type hats glued by the rims to a varnished board. Meredith Rand leans forward and makes as if to rest her chin on the knuckles of one hand, though it’s easy to see that the actual weight of her chin and skull is not really resting on these knuckles; it’s more a stance than a way of making herself comfortable. ‘And then if I say you’re interesting, though, what’s your inward reaction?’
‘That it’s a compliment. It’s a pleasantry, but also an invitation to continue the tête-à-tête. To make it more personal or revealing.’
Rand waved that hand in a small gesture of impatience or acknowledgment. ‘But how does it make you feel, as they say in Evaluation?’
‘Well,’ Shane Drinion says, ‘I think an expression of interest like that makes a person feel good. Provided the person saying it isn’t trying to propose a level of intimacy that makes you feel uncomfortable.’
‘Did it make you uncomfortable?’
Drinion pauses for another brief moment, though he doesn’t move and his expression does not change. There’s again maybe the smallest instant of blankness or withdrawal. Rand has the sense of an optical reader scanning a stack of cards very fast and efficiently; there is a kind of ambient unsonic hum about him. ‘No. I suppose if you meant it sarcastically it would be uncomfortable—I would think you were angry at me or found me unpleasant. But you gave no sign that you meant it sarcastically. So no, I’m not sure what you meant by interesting, but people naturally like to be found interesting to other people, so the curiosity about just what you mean is not uncomfortable. In fact, if I understand it, it is this curiosity that the remark “You know, if you want to know the truth, you kind of interest me” is meant to arouse. The conversation then becomes about just what the person who said it meant. Then the other person gets to find out just what about him interests another person, which is enjoyable.’
‘Ex—’
‘At the same time,’ Drinion continues, showing no sign that he’s noticed Rand starting to say something even though he’s been looking right at her, ‘someone who finds you interesting seems then suddenly, almost by virtue of their interest in you, more interesting to you. That is a very interesting dimension to it also.’ He stops. Meredith Rand pauses a little extra bit of time to make sure he’s now stopped for good. Like her own left pinkie, Drinion’s left pinkie finger is noticeably puckered and pale from wearing the rubber all day in Exams. There’s no way she even wants to notice Drinion’s clothing enough to even catalogue or characterize it to herself. Just the sweater vest alone is a tremendous downer. She has her white vinyl cigarette case out and unsnaps it and withdraws a cigarette, since it’s just the two of them at the table.
‘So, and do you think you’re interesting?’ Meredith Rand asks him. ‘Do you see how someone could think you’re interesting?’
Drinion takes another sip from his glass and puts it back down. Meredith Rand notices that he places it perfectly centered on the napkin without trying to or without having to adjust the glass’s base in small fussy ways to get it perfectly centered on the napkin. That Drinion in not graceful the way dancers or athletes are, but there is something graceful. His movements are very precise and economical without being prissy. The glasses on the table that are not on napkins have large and variously shaped pools of condensation around them. Someone has selected the same popular song to play twice in a row on Meibeyer’s big jukebox, which has concentric rings of red and white lights on an integrated circuit that allows them to go on and off in such a way that they accompany the chosen song’s bass line.
Shane Drinion says: ‘I don’t think I’ve ever really considered it.’
‘Do you know why they call you Mr. X?’
‘I think so.’
‘Do you know why they call Chahla the Iranian Crisis?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Do you know why they call McKenzie Second-Knuckle Bob?’
‘No.’
Meredith Rand sees Drinion looking at the cigarette. Her lighter is in a special loop attached to the cigarette case, which is cheap pebbled vinyl—Meredith Rand ends up losing her cigarettes in different places so often that it makes no sense to have an expensive cigarette case. She knows, from the Pod’s workday breaks, that it would be pointless to offer Drinion a cigarette.
‘What about you? Do you think I’m interesting?’ Rand asks Shane Drinion. ‘I mean, apart from me saying you were interesting.’
Drinion’s eyes are on hers—he makes a lot of eye contact without being in any way challenging or flirty—while he seems to do the same internal card-sorting thing he’s done before. Drinion wears an argyle sweater vest, strange, pebbly-textured polyester slacks, and brown Wallabee knockoffs that might literally be from JC Penney. The cold stream from the vent overhead tears the smoke ring to shreds the minute she shapes and exhales it. Beth Rath is now playing foosball with Herb Dritz while Keith Sabusawa watches the pregame warmup to a Cardinals baseball game on the television above the bar. You can tell that Beth would rather be sitting with Sabusawa but isn’t sure how forward to be about her feelings for Sabusawa, who has always struck Meredith Rand as awfully tall for an oriental. Drinion also has a way of nodding where the nod has nothing to do with etiquette or affirmation. He says: ‘You’re pleasant, and so far I’m enjoying the tête-à-tête. It’s a chance to pay direct attention to you, which is otherwise hard to do, because it seems to make you uncomfortable.’ He waits for a moment to see if she wants to say anything. Drinion’s facial expression isn’t blank, but it’s bland and neutral in a way that might as well be blank for all it tells you. Meredith Rand has, without being quite aware of it, quit trying with the rings.
‘Is liking paying attention the same thing as being interested in somebody?’
‘Well, I would say almost anything you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.’
‘Is that true?’
‘I think so, yes.’ Drinion says: ‘Of course you’re especially interesting to pay attention to because you’re attractive. It’s almost always pleasant to pay attention to beauty. It requires no effort.’
Rand’s eyes have narrowed, though part of this may have been the bits of cigarette smoke being blown back into her face by the AC vent.
Shane Drinion says: ‘Beauty is almost by definition interesting, if by interesting you mean something that compels attention and makes attention feel pleasant. Although the word you just used was interested rather than interesting.’
‘You do know I’m married,’ says Meredith Rand.
‘Yes. Everyone knows you’re married. You wear a wedding ring. Your spouse picks you up at the south entrance several days a week. His car has a small hole in the exhaust that gives the engine a powerful sound. A sound that makes the car sound more powerful than normal, I mean.’
Meredith Rand does not look pleased at all. ‘Maybe I’m confused. If you just said that it makes me uncomfortable, why even bring up the attractiveness thing?’
‘Well, you asked me a question,’ Drinion says. ‘I told you what I decided is the truth. It took a second to decide what the true answer is and what is and isn’t part of it. Then I said it. It isn’t intended to make you uncomfortable. But it isn’t intended to keep you from being uncomfortable, either—you didn’t ask about that.’
‘Oh, and you’re the authority on what the truth is because…?’
Drinion waits a moment. In just the same tiny interval as the pause, it occurs to Meredith Rand that Drinion’s pausing to see whether there’s more or whether the truncated question is meant to invite him to supply the answer. Meaning is it sarcastic. Meaning he has no natural sense of whether something was sarcastic or not. ‘No. I’m not an authority on the truth. You asked me a question about me being interested, and I tried to determine the truth of what I felt, and to say that truth to you, because my assumption was that’s what was wanted.’
‘I notice you weren’t nearly as, like, blunt and forthcoming about how me saying I found you interesting made you feel.’
Drinion’s expression and tone haven’t changed even a little bit. ‘I’m sorry. I’m having a hard time understanding what you just said.’
‘I’m saying when I asked you how me finding you interesting made you feel, you weren’t as blunt about answering. You skittered and skipped all over. Now with me all of a sudden there’s a sudden concern for the blunt truth.’
‘Now I understand.’ Again a slight pause. The light-brand’s smoke does taste thin against the aftertaste of tonic and lime. ‘I don’t recall any part of me trying to be evasive or false in that answer. Maybe I’m able to express some things better than others. I think that’s a common finding for people. Also, I don’t usually speak very much. I’m hardly ever in a tête-à-tête, actually. It may be that I’m not as skilled as other people at speaking in a consistent way about how something makes me feel.’
‘Can I ask you a question?’
‘Yes.’
Rand is now having no problem looking directly at Drinion. ‘It doesn’t occur to you that all that might strike somebody as a little condescending?’
Drinion’s brow moves ever so slightly upward as he thinks. The baseball game has now started on the television, which may explain why Keith Sabusawa, who’s usually keen to leave after Happy Hour has ended, hasn’t left yet, and so neither has Shane Drinion. Sabusawa is tall enough that he has his loafers partly on the floor instead of hooked into the little support near the barstool’s base. Ron, the bartender, has a small towel and a glass in his hand and is making cleaning motions but is also looking up at the game, and he’s saying something to Keith Sabusawa, who in fact sometimes keeps whole long lists of baseball statistics in his head, which according to Beth Rath he finds soothing and restful to think about. Two great flashing, twittering pinball machines stand against the wall just south of the air hockey game, which no Meibeyer’s patron ever plays because there’s some chronic malfunction that makes air blow too hard through the table’s pinholes and the puck rides several inches off the surface and is next to impossible to keep from flying off the table altogether. On the nearer of the pinball machines, a beautiful Amazon in a Lycra bodysuit is lifting by the hair a man whose limbs appear to gyrate in time with the syncopated lights of the obstacles and gateways and flippers.
Drinion says: ‘That doesn’t occur to me. But I do notice that you’ve become angry or upset in response to something I’ve said. This I can tell,’ he says. ‘It occurs to me that you might want to end this tête-à-tête conversation even though your spouse hasn’t arrived yet to pick you up, but that possibly you’re not sure how to do it, and so you feel somewhat trapped, and this is part of what’s angering you.’
‘And you, you don’t have to be someplace?’
‘No.’
An interesting bit of trivia is that Meredith Rand actually outranks Drinion, technically, since she’s a GS-10 and Drinion a GS-9. This even though Drinion is several orders of magnitude more effective than Rand as an examiner. Both his daily average of returns and his ratio of total returns examined to total additional revenue produced through audit are much higher than Meredith Rand’s. The truth is that utility examiners have a harder time getting promoted, since promotions usually result from Group Managers’ recommendations, and UTEXs are rarely at one Post or Pod long enough to develop the sort of rapport with superiors that makes the superior willing to go through the paperwork hassle of recommending someone for a promotion. Also, since utility examiners are often the best at what they do, there is a disincentive in the Service against promoting them, since at GS-15 a Service employee moves into administration and can no longer travel from Post to Post. One of the things that regular posted wigglers find mysterious about UTEXs is what motivations induce them to serve as UTEXs when the position is something of a career-killer in terms of advancement and pay raises. As of 1 July 1983, the difference between a GS-9’s and a GS-10’s annual salary is $3,220 gross, which is not pocket change. Like many wigglers, Meredith Rand assumes that there’s a certain type of basic personality that’s maybe drawn to the constant movement and lack of attachment of being a utility examiner, plus the variety of challenges, and that Personnel has ways to test for these personality traits and so to ID certain examiners as likely UTEX candidates. There is a certain prestige or romance to the UTEX lifestyle, but part of this is married or elsewise dug-in employees’ romanticization of the unattached lifestyle of somebody who goes from Post to Post at the institutional whim of the Service, like a cowboy or mercenary. Lots of UTEXs have come to Peoria since late winter / spring ’84—there are a variety of theories about why.
‘Do you usually keep hanging out here after the hour and the whole Second-Knuckle crowd leaves?’
Drinion shakes his head. He doesn’t mention the fact that he cannot leave Meibeyer’s until Keith Sabusawa does. Meredith Rand doesn’t know whether he fails to mention this obvious fact because he knows that Meredith already knows it, or whether this guy is so totally literal that what he does is just answer whatever question she asks, literally, like a machine, like with only a yes or a no if it’s a yes-or-no question. She puts out her cigarette in the little yellow foil disposable-type ashtray that you have to request directly from Ron if you want to smoke, because Meibeyer’s has had problems with ashtrays disappearing, hard as that is to really believe given their chintziness. She extinguishes the cigarette a bit more thoroughly and emphatically than she usually does, in order to reinforce a certain tonal impatience in what she says as she puts the cigarette out: ‘All right then.’
Drinion rotates his upper body slightly in his chair to see just where Keith Sabusawa is at the bar. Rand is 90 percent sure that the movement isn’t any sort of performance or anything that is meant to communicate something nonverbally to her. Outside in the sky to the northwest are great sheer walls of rim-lit sunset clouds in whose interior there is sometimes muttering and light. None of the people in Meibeyer’s can see these clouds, although you can always tell physically that rain’s on the way if you pay attention to certain subliminal physical signals like sinuses, bunions, a particular kind of incipient headache, a slight felt change in the quality of the cold of the air-conditioning.
‘So tell me why you think the prettiness thing makes me uncomfortable.’
‘I don’t know for certain. All I could give you is a guess.’
‘You know, you’re not really quite as direct as you seem at first, it turns out.’
Drinion continues to look directly at Meredith Rand but without any sort of challenge or evident agenda. Rand, who is certainly in a position to know that guilelessness can be a form of guile, will tell Beth Rath that it was a little like having a cow or horse look at you: Not only did you not know what they were thinking as they looked at you, or if they were thinking at all—you had no sense of what they were even really seeing as they looked, and yet at the same time you felt yourself truly seen.
‘All right, I’ll play the little game here,’ Meredith Rand says. ‘Do you think I’m pretty?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you find me attractive?’
‘…’
‘Well, do you?’
‘I find that question confusing. I’ve heard it in movies and read it in books. It’s strangely phrased. There’s something confusing about it. It seems to ask for an objective opinion as to whether the person you’re talking to would describe you as attractive. From the context it usually appears in, though, it seems almost always to be a way of asking whether the person you’re talking to is sexually attracted to you.’
Meredith Rand says: ‘Well, sometimes you have to let a roundabout way of saying things pass, don’t you? Some things can’t be said straight out or it’s just too gross. Can you imagine somebody saying “Are you sexually attracted to me?”’
‘Actually yes, I can.’
‘But it’d be awfully uncomfortable to ask it that way, wouldn’t it?’
‘I can understand how it could be uncomfortable or even unpleasant, especially if the other person wasn’t sexually attracted. I’m fairly sure that packed into the straightforward question is the suggestion that the asker is sexually attracted to the other person and wants to know whether the feeling is reciprocated. So—yes, this means I was wrong. There are questions or assumptions also packed into the underlying question, too. You’re correct—the business of sexual attraction seems to be a subject that it’s not possible to be wholly straightforward in talking about.’
Rand’s expression is now patronizing enough to be irksome or annoying to the vast majority of people she might be speaking with. ‘And why do you think that is?’
Drinion pauses a moment. ‘I think it’s probably because direct sexual rejection is intensely unpleasant for people, and the less directly you express information about your sexual attraction to someone, the less directly you feel rejected if there’s no corresponding expression of attraction.’
‘There’s something kind of tiring about you,’ Rand observes. ‘Talking to you.’
Drinion nods.
‘It’s like you’re both interesting and really boring at the same time.’
‘I’ve certainly been told that people feel I’m boring.’
‘The Mr. Excitement thing.’
‘The nickname is obviously sarcastic.’
‘Have you ever been on a date?’
‘No.’
‘Have you ever asked someone out, or expressed being attracted to somebody?’
‘No.’
‘Don’t you get kind of lonely?’
A small pause for this. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Do you think you’d know if you did?’
‘I think I would.’
‘Do you know what’s on the jukebox right now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you by any chance a homo?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You don’t think so?’ Rand says.
‘I don’t think I’m really anything. I don’t think I’ve ever had what you mean by sexual attraction.’
Rand is very good at reading affect on people’s faces, and as far as she can tell there’s nothing here on Drinion’s face to read. ‘Not even when you were a teenager?’
That little pause for scanning again. ‘Not really.’
‘Did you worry you might be a homo?’
‘No.’
‘Did you worry that something was maybe wrong with you?’
‘No.’
‘Did other people worry that something was wrong?’
Another pause, both blank and not. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Really?’
‘You mean as an adolescent?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think the truth is that no one paid enough attention to me to even wonder what was going on inside me, much less to worry about it.’ He hasn’t moved a bit.
‘Not even your family?’
‘No.’
‘Did that kind of bum you out?’
‘No.’
‘Were you lonely?’
‘No.’
‘Do you ever get lonely?’
Rand has come almost to be able to expect the pause after some questions, or to absorb it as a normal part of Drinion’s conversational rhythm. Drinion doesn’t acknowledge that she has already asked this before.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Not ever?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Why not?’
Drinion takes another sip from his glass of warm beer. There is something about the economy of his movements that Rand enjoys watching without even being quite aware that she enjoys it. ‘I don’t think I know how to answer that,’ the utility examiner says.
‘Well, like when you notice other people having romances or sex lives, and you don’t, or you can tell they feel lonely and you don’t, what do you think about the difference between you and them?’
There is a pause. Drinion says: ‘I think there’s a doubleness about what it is you’re asking. It’s really about comparing. I think it’s more like if I’m watching someone and paying attention to them and thinking about what they’re like, I’m not paying so much attention to myself and what I’m like. So there’s no way to compare.’
‘You don’t ever compare anything to anything?’
Drinion looks at his hand and the glass. ‘I have a hard time paying attention to more than one thing at a time. I think it’s one reason I don’t drive, for instance.’
‘But you know what’s playing on the jukebox.’
‘Yes.’
‘But if you’re paying attention to our little conversation here, how do you know what’s on the jukebox?’
There is now a longer pause. Drinion’s face looks slightly different when he comes to the end of his two-second-scan thing.
Drinion says: ‘Well, it’s very loud, and also I’ve heard this song several times on the radio, either four or five times, and when it plays on the radio when it’s over they often give the song’s title and artist. I believe this is how radio stations are able to play copyrighted songs without being required to pay any sort of per-use fee. The radio play is part of the advertising of the record album that the song is part of. It’s a bit confusing, though. The idea that hearing the song several times for free on the radio makes the customer more likely to go to the store and buy the song seems somewhat confusing to me. Granted, often what is being sold is the entire record album that the song is only one part of, so it may be that the song on the radio functions a little bit like a preview of a movie that they show as an inducement to buy a ticket for that later movie, of which the preview is obviously only one small part. There’s also the matter of how the record companies’ accounting personnel treat the expenses involved in free radio play. It seems to be not a matter of corporate and ICE but rather inter-corporate, if you think about it. Surely there are significant shipping and distribution costs involved in placing the recording of the song in the hands of the radio stations that will play it. Can the record company or its parent write off these costs if the radio stations are not paying any fee for the rights to air the song and so there is no income against which to write off the expenses? Or can they be deducted as marketing and advertising expenses if in fact no moneys are being paid to the ostensible advertiser, here the radio stations or their parent companies, but rather only to the postal service or some private carrier? How would the Service examiner be able to distinguish such expenses from illicit or padded deductions if no larger compensation could be referenced against which to add or subtract these distribution costs?’
Meredith Rand says: ‘Can I say that one of the reasons you come off as a little boring is that you don’t seem like you have any sense of what the real topic of a conversation is? This stuff doesn’t have anything to do with what we were just talking about, does it?’
Drinion looks slightly puzzled for a moment, but not hurt or embarrassed. Rand says: ‘What makes you imagine anybody possibly even wants to hear some long job-related noodle you don’t even know about if the whole point of being here is that it’s Friday and we don’t have to think about shit like this for two days?’
Drinion says: ‘You don’t normally choose to devote time to matters like this unless you’re clocked in, you’re saying.’
‘I’m talking about loneliness and people paying attention to you or not and you launch into this whole long like thing about radio expense protocols and it turns out the point of the whole thing is only that there’s procedural stuff you don’t know?’
Drinion nods in a thoughtful way. ‘I understand what you’re saying.’
‘What do you imagine is going through the other person’s mind when you’re ranting like that? Do you just automatically assume they’re interested? Who cares about radio accounting if you’re not tasked to it?’
Beth Rath is now seated between Keith Sabusawa and somebody else at the bar, all on stools in identical stool-postures that to Meredith Rand always look vulturelike. Howard Shearwater is playing pinball, at which he’s said to excel—his pinball machine is the more distant one from their table, and the angle of incidence doesn’t allow Rand to see the design or motif of the machine. The sun is not yet all the way down but the bar’s low lights in the artificial tiki torches on the wall have come up, and the air-conditioner vents’ rate seems at least to have been cranked back a bit. As baseball fans, real Peorians tend to be equally divided between the Cubs and the Cardinals, though in this era the Cubs fans tend to keep their partisanship more to themselves. Baseball on television is just about the most tedious type of sport there is, in Meredith Rand’s husband’s opinion. It may or may not rain, as usual. There are different-shaped puddles of condensation on all the places that do or did have a glass, and none of these ever evaporate. Drinion still hasn’t spoken or fidgeted or changed his facial expression much at all. This now right here is cigarette number three since 5:10. There are no attempted rings.
Meredith Rand says: ‘What are you thinking now?’
‘I’m thinking that you raise a number of points that seem valid, and that I’m going to maybe have to give the whole matter of what someone is thinking when I’m speaking to them about something more thought.’
Rand does the thing she can do where she smiles broadly with everything except the muscles around her eyes. ‘Are you patronizing me?’
‘No.’
‘Are you being sarcastic?’
‘No. I can tell you’ve become angry, though.’
She exhales two brief tusks of smoke. Because of less backdraft from the air-conditioner vent, some of the smoke is going into Shane Drinion’s face. ‘Did you know that my husband is dying?’
‘No. I didn’t,’ Drinion says.
They both sit for a moment, doing the respective sorts of facial things they are inclined to do.
‘Aren’t you going to say you’re sorry?’
‘What?’ Drinion says.
‘It’s what you say. It’s the standard etiquette thing to say.’
‘Well, I was considering this fact in the light of your asking me about sexual feelings and loneliness. Receipt of this fact changes the context for that conversation, it seems.’
‘Should I ask how so?’ Meredith Rand says.
Drinion inclines his head. ‘I don’t know that.’
‘Did you think finding out he was dying might mean you’ve got some kind of sexual chance with me?’
‘I had not thought that, no.’
‘Good. That’s good.’
Beth Rath has started back over to the table with her mouth partly open to maybe say something or try to join the conversation, but Meredith Rand gives her a look that makes Rath turn around and return to her place on the red leather stool at the bar, where Ron is changing out the club soda cartridge. Meredith Rand puts her purse on the table and rises to recharge her glass.
‘Do you want another Heineken or whatever?’
‘I still haven’t finished this one.’
‘You don’t exactly party down, do you?’
‘I get full quickly. My stomach doesn’t seem to hold very much.’
‘Lucky you.’
Rand, Rath, and Sabusawa have some kind of quick conversation while Ron is making Meredith Rand’s gin and tonic, which Drinion doesn’t hear, though he can see slight reflections of the people at the bar in Meibeyer’s front window. Nobody knows what he looks like or what his face is doing as he sits at the table alone, or even what he’s looking at.
‘Do you know what cardiomyopathy is?’ Rand asks when she sits back down. She looks at her purse, which is almost more of a bag in terms of shape. Half the gin and tonic is already gone.
‘Yes.’
‘Yes what?’
‘I think it’s a disease of the heart.’
Meredith Rand taps her cigarette lighter experimentally against her front teeth. ‘You seem like a good listener. Are you? You want to hear a sad story?’
After a moment, Drinion says: ‘I’m not certain how to answer that.’
‘I mean my sad story. Part of mine. Everybody’s got their sad story. You want to hear part of mine?’
‘…’
‘It’s actually a disease of the muscle of the heart. Cardiomyopathy.’
‘I thought that the heart was itself a muscle,’ Shane Drinion says.
‘It means as opposed to the vasculature of the heart. Trust me, I’m kind of an expert on this. What they call heart disease is the major vessels. As in a heart attack. Cardiomyopathy is the muscle of the heart, the stuff of it, the thing that squeezes and relaxes. Especially when it’s of unknown cause. Which it is. They aren’t sure what caused it. The theory was that he’d had a terrible flu or some virus when he was in college that seemed to get better but nobody knew it had settled in his myocardium somehow, the muscle tissue of his heart, and gradually infected it and compromised it.’
‘I think I understand.’
‘You’re thinking how sad, maybe, to fall in love and get married and then have your husband get a fatal disease—because it is, it’s fatal. Like the rich kid in that movie, what’s it called, except there it’s the wife, who’s kind of a lump if you want my opinion, but the rich kid gets disinherited and everything and marries her and then she gets fatally ill. It’s a tear-jerker.’ Rand’s eyes, too, change slightly when she’s scanning some kind of memory. ‘It’s a little like congestive heart failure. Actually, in many cases of cardiomyopathy the actual cause of death when the person finally dies is listed as congestive heart failure.’
Shane Drinion has his hand around his glass with a little beer but does not raise the glass. ‘Is this because the muscle of the heart becomes compromised and can’t squeeze well enough to circulate the blood?’
‘Yes, and he had it before we got married, he had it even before I met him, and I met him when I was super young, I wasn’t even eighteen yet. And he was thirty-two, and a ward attendant in Zeller.’ She is extracting a cigarette. ‘Do you happen to know what Zeller is?’
‘I think you mean the mental health center building near the Exposition Gardens on Northmoor.’ Drinion’s bottom is hovering very slightly—perhaps one or two millimeters at most—above the seat of his wooden chair.
‘It’s actually on University, the main entrance is.’
‘…’
‘It’s a psych hospital. Do you know what a psych hospital is?’
‘In a general sense, yes.’
‘Are you just being polite?’
‘No.’
‘The bin. The mental Marriott. A nut ward. Do you want to know why I was there?’
‘Were you visiting someone important to you?’
‘Negative. I was a patient there for three and a half weeks. Do you want to know how come?’
‘I can’t tell whether you’re really asking me, or whether this question is simply an overture to telling me.’
Meredith Rand makes her mouth into a sardonic sideways shape and clicks her tongue a couple times. ‘All right. That’s kind of annoying, but I can’t say you don’t have a point. I was a cutter. Do you know what a cutter is?’
There is no difference—Drinion’s face remains composed and neutral without seeming in any way to be trying to stay neutral. Meredith Rand has a very good subliminal antenna for this sort of thing—she’s allergic to performance. ‘My assumption is that it’s someone who cuts.’
‘Was that like a witticism?’
‘No.’
‘I didn’t know why I did it. I’m still not sure, except he taught me that trying to analyze it or understand all the whys was bullshit—the only important thing was knocking it off, because if I didn’t it would land me right back in the psych ward, that the idea I could hide it with bandages or sleeves and keep it a totally private thing that didn’t affect anybody else was arrogant bullshit. And he’s right. No matter where you do it or how carefully you do it, there’s always a time when somebody sees something and says something, or when somebody is funking around in the hall and pretending to beg you to cut algebra and go to the park and get stoned and climb on the statue of Lincoln and grabs your arm too hard and some of the cuts open up and you bleed through your long sleeves, even if you’ve got two shirts on, and somebody sends for the nurse even if you tell them to fuck off and it was an accident and you’ll just go home and get it seen to at home. There always comes a day when somebody sees something in your face that tells them you’re lying and then the next thing you know there you are, in a lit room with your arms and legs uncovered, trying to explain yourself to somebody with zero sense of humor, actually a little bit like talking to you right now.’ With a quick tight smile.
Drinion nods slowly.
‘That was kind of nasty. I need to apologize for that.’
‘I don’t have a very good sense of humor, it’s true.’
‘This is different. It’s like they do this initial intake interview, with a legal form on a white clipboard they ask you questions from as required by law, and if they ask you if you ever hear voices and you say sure, I hear yours right now asking me a question, they don’t think it’s funny or even acknowledge you’re even trying to be funny but just sit there looking at you. Like they’re a computer and you can’t proceed until you give the properly formatted answer.’
‘The question itself seems ambiguous. For instance, what voices are they referring to?’
‘So they have, like, three different kinds of wards at Zeller, and two of them are locked, and the one they put me on as a mental patient is the one that he also worked on, on the third floor, with mostly rich girls from the Heights who wouldn’t eat or took a bottle of Tylenol when their boyfriend dumped them, et cetera, or stuck their finger down their throat every time they ate something. There were a lot of barfers there.’
Drinion keeps looking at her. Now no part of his bottom or back is touching the chair, although the separation is so slight that no one else could see this unless somehow a very bright light were shined from the side, illuminating the slight gap between Drinion and the chair.
‘You might be asking how I got in there, since we definitely were not rich or from the Heights.’
‘…’
‘The answer is good insurance through my dad’s union. He ran the baling wire line at American Twine and Wire from 1956 until it closed down. The only days of work he ever missed were some of the days I was in Zeller.’ Rand makes a very brief distended horror-face whose exact meaning is unclear and lights the cigarette she has been holding and looking at. ‘To give you an idea.’
Drinion finishes the last bit of the Michelob and wipes his mouth a little on the napkin the glass has rested on. He then replaces the napkin and the glass. His beer’s been at room temperature for much too long to produce any new condensation.
‘And it’s true that he already looked sick when I met him. Not gross or anything, it’s not like he oozed or went around coughing or anything, but pale, even for winter. He looked delicate, like somebody old. He was totally skinny, too, although compared to the anorexic girls it was hard to see right off how skinny he was—it was more like he was so pale and got tired easily; he couldn’t move very fast. With the terrible dark circles under his eyes. Some of the time he looked tired or sleepy, although it was also late at night, because he was the second-shift ward attendant on the ward, from five to the middle of the night when the night guy came on, who we never even really saw except for breakfast or if somebody had a crisis in the middle of the night.’
‘He wasn’t a doctor, then,’ Drinion says.
‘The doctors were a joke. At Zeller. The psychiatrists. They came in in the afternoon for like an hour, in suits—they always wore nice suits; they were professionals—and talked more to the RNs and the parents when they came in, mostly. And then they’d finally come in and you’d have a weird, stiff conversation, like they were your dad or something. And they had zero sense of humor, and looked at their watch the whole time. Even the ones who you could halfway see might be human beings were more interested in your case, not in you. Like in what your case might mean, how it was like or different than other cases in the textbooks. Don’t get me started on the medical establishment at psych wards. They were bizarre to deal with; it could really mess with your head. If you said you hated it there and it wasn’t helping and you wanted to leave, they saw it as a symptom of your case, not as you wanting to leave. It was like you weren’t a human being, you were a piece of machinery they could take apart and figure out how it worked.’ She snaps and unsnaps her cigarette case. ‘It was really scary, actually, because they could sign papers to keep you in there or move you to a worse ward, the other locked ward was a lot worse and people talked about it, you don’t want to hear about it. Or they could decide to give you meds that turned some of the girls into zombies; it’s like one day they were there and the next there was nobody home. Like zomboids in really nice bathrobes from home. It was just very creepy.’
‘…’
‘They couldn’t do horror-movie stuff, though, they couldn’t give you electroshock treatments like in that one movie, because everybody’s parents were right there practically every day and knew what was going on. If you were on that ward you weren’t committed to Zeller, you were admitted, and after seven days they actually had to let you go if your parents said so. Which some of them did, of the zombie girls. But they could legally sign forms that changed you to committed. The doctors in the suits could, so they were the scariest ones.’
‘…’
‘Plus the food was beyond gross.’
‘You had been giving yourself small, hidden cuts as some sort of psychological compensation,’ Shane Drinion says.
Meredith Rand gives him a level look. She does notice that he seems to be sitting up slightly straighter or something, because the very lowest part of the display of different kinds of hats is obscured, and she knows she isn’t slumped down. ‘It felt good. It was creepy, and I knew it couldn’t be good if I was so secret and creepy about it, but it felt good. I don’t know that else to say.’ Every time she taps ash, it’s three taps of the same speed and angle with a red-nailed finger. ‘But I had fantasies about cutting on my neck, my face, which was creepy, and I’d been moving further up my arms all year without being able to help it, which scared me in hindsight. It was good I was in there; it was crazy—so maybe they were right after all.’
Drinion simply watches her. There is no way to tell whether it is building up to really rain or if the mass will miss them. The light outside is the approximate color of a spent flashbulb. It’s too loud in here to know if there is thunder. Sometimes the air-conditioning seems to get colder or more insistent when it is about to storm, but that is not what it feels like is happening now.
Meredith Rand says: ‘You have to say little things occasionally, like it’s a real conversation, to show you’re at least interested. Otherwise the person just feels like they’re yammering and the other person could be thinking about God only knows what.’
‘But putting cuts on your face would have externalized the situation too much,’ Drinion says.
‘There you go. Plus I didn’t want to cut my face. As he ended up showing me, my surface face was all I really thought I had. My face and my body, that I was supposedly a fox. I was one of the foxes at Central Catholic. That’s a high school here. They called us that—the foxes. Most of them were cheerleaders, too.’
Drinion says: ‘So you were raised in the Catholic faith.’
Rand shakes her head as she taps the cigarette. ‘That’s not relevant. That’s not the kind of little occasional response I meant.’
‘…’
‘The connection is the stuff about prettiness and loneliness you were talking about. Or we were, which is hard to understand, probably, given how supposedly being considered as good-looking in high school is the female ticket to popularity and being accepted and all the things that are supposed to be the opposite of loneliness.’ She sometimes uses direct questions as an excuse to meet his gaze directly: ‘Were you lonely in high school?’
‘Not really.’
‘Right. Oh, right. Plus beauty is a form of power. People pay attention to you. It can be very seductive.’
‘Yes.’
Only in close retrospect does Meredith Rand consider the strange intensity of talking to the utility examiner. Ordinarily very conscious of her surroundings and what other people around her were doing, Rand later realized that large blocks of the tête-à-tête at Meibeyer’s seemed removed from any kind of environment at all. That within these blocks of intense engagement she had been unconscious of the jukebox’s intrusive music or the thud of its excessive bass in her breastbone, the insistent burbles and dings of the pinball machines and video raceway game, the televised baseball above the bar, the normally distracting roar of surrounding conversations in which different audible snatches sometimes rose out and commanded attention and then receded into the ambient distracting noise of mixed-together voices all raised to overcome the room’s own noise. The only way she is able to explain it to Beth Rath is that it was as if a sort of insulated container had formed around their table and sometimes hardly anything else had penetrated through it. Even though it wasn’t like she just sat there looking right at the utility man all the time; it wasn’t like a hypnotic thing. She also hadn’t been aware of how much time had passed or was passing, which for Meredith Rand was a very unusual thing.* The best theory Meredith Rand could come up with was that it was that ‘Mr. X’ paid such close, intense attention to what she was saying—an intensity that had nothing to do with flirting or anything romantic; this was a whole different type of intensity—although it was also true to say that Meredith Rand had experienced absolutely zero romantic or sexual attraction to Shane Drinion at that table in Meibeyer’s. It was something else entirely.
‘It was him who told me this. Who laid it out that way. At night, after dinner, after all the groups and OT were over and the doctors in their nice suits went home and there was just one nurse on the meds desk and him. He had the white staff coat with a sweater and these plastic sneakers and a big ring of keys. You could hear him down the hall without looking, just from the ring of keys. We used to tell him it looked like the ring of keys weighed more than he did. Some of the girls gave him a lot of grief, because it wasn’t like he could really do anything to them.’
‘…’
‘There wasn’t anything to do after visits at night except watch TV in the community room, or play Ping-Pong on a table that had a really low net so even the girls on heavy meds could feel like they could play, too, and all he had to do was do med checks and give people passes for the phone, and at the end of his shift he had to fill out evals on everybody, which was totally routine unless there was some kind of psych crisis.’
‘So you observed him closely, it seems,’ Shane Drinion says.
‘It wasn’t like he was much to look at if you were going to call somebody good-looking or not. Some of the girls called him the corpse. They had to have their mean little names for everybody. Or they called him the grim reaper. It was all just physical. But it was like no part of him touched his clothes on the inside; they just hung on him. He moved like he was about sixty. But he was funny, and he really talked to you. If anybody wanted to talk about something, meaning really talk, he’d go in the conference room off the kitchen with them and talk.’ Meredith Rand has a set of routines for putting the cigarette out, all of which, whether fast and stabbing or slow and more grinding from the side, are quite thorough. ‘He didn’t make anybody do it. It wasn’t like he was tugging on your sleeve to go do tête-à-tête or let him practice on you. Most people just vegged out in front of the TV, or the ones in for drugs had to go to their drug meeting in the van. He had to put his feet up on the table, usually, when you had a one-on-one with him. The table in the conference room that the doctors spread out their files to talk to the parents at. He’d lean way back and put his sneakers up on the table, which he said it was because he had a bad back, but really it was because of the cardiomyopathy, which he’d gotten mysteriously in college and was why he didn’t finish college, which was why he was working this shitty nut ward attendant job, even though he was about seven thousand times smarter and more perceptive about what was really going on with people than the doctors and so-called counselors were. They saw everybody through this professional lens that was about half an inch across—whatever didn’t fit in the lens they either didn’t see or twisted it or squished it in so it fit. And having his feet in those chintzy Kmart shoes up on the table like that made him seem more like at least a person, like somebody you were really talking to instead of somebody trying to just diagnose you or trace your etiology so they’d have something to say that fit their little lens. They were a total joke, those shoes.’
‘May I ask a question?’
‘Why not just ask the question instead of taking the time to make me say yes you can ask a question?’
‘I see what you’re saying.’
‘So?’
‘Elevating his feet was to help him circulate blood more efficiently?’
‘That’s what you wanted to ask?’
‘Is that not the sort of small, reinforcing question you were talking about?’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ Rand says. ‘Yes, it’s for circulation. Although at the time who knew why it was. It was believable he had a bad back. He sure didn’t look comfortable. All you could really tell was that this was somebody who was not in great shape.’
‘He appeared frail, especially for his age.’
Sometimes now Rand will every so often toss her head back and to the side a tiny bit, very rapidly, as if rearranging her hair’s feathering without touching it, which certain types of adolescent girls do a great deal without necessarily being aware of it. ‘By the way, he taught me the word etiology. And he explained why the doctors had to be so distant and stiff; it was just part of their job. He didn’t force anybody, but at times it seemed like he picked certain people to talk to, and he made it hard to resist. The nights could be hard, and it wasn’t like watching Maude with suicidal people or people on heavy meds was going to help very much.’
‘…’
‘Do you remember Maude?’
‘No I don’t.’
‘My mom loved that show. It was about the last thing in the world I wanted to see in there. If her husband got mad and told her “Maude, sit,” she’d sit, like a dog, and it got a big laugh on the canned laughter. Some feminism. Or Charlie’s Angels, which was just totally insulting, if you were a feminist.’
‘…’
‘The way he started talking to me was in the pink room, which was the isolation room, which is where they put you if you were on suicide watch and the law said you had to be legally observed twenty-four hours a day, or if you acted out in a disciplinary way where they said you presented a danger or disruptive influence—they could put you in there.’
‘Called the pink room because that was the room’s color?’ Drinion asks.
Meredith Rand smiles coolly. ‘Baker-Miller pink, to be exact, because there had been experiments showing that seeing pink soothed mental agitation, and soon every nut ward everywhere started painting their isolation room pink. He told me that, too. He explained the color of the room they put me in; it had a sloped floor and a drain in the middle like something out of the Middle Ages. I was never on suicide watch, if you’re wondering. I have no idea how tripped out you are by any of this, like uh-oh here’s this crazy person, she was in Zeller when she was seventeen.’
‘I wasn’t thinking that.’
‘What I did was tell a doctor who wasn’t even my doctor, I mean the one my dad’s insurance was paying for, but this was a different doctor who’d come in and cover for the doctor’s cases when he couldn’t come in, they all covered for each other all the time this way, so in like five days you’d talk to three different doctors, and they had to spread your file and case notes or whatever out on the table to even remember who you were—and this doctor, who never even blinked, kept trying to get me to talk about being abused and neglected as a child, which I never was, and I ended up telling him he was a freaking idiot and that he could either believe me when I told him the truth or just stick it up his stupid fat butt. And then that night I’m in the pink room, he’d ordered it, which was bullshit. Not like they dragged me in there and threw me in and slammed the door—everybody was pretty nice about it. But you know, one of the weird things about being in a psych hospital is you gradually start to feel like you have permission to say whatever you’re thinking. You feel like it’s OK or maybe even in some way expected to act crazy or uninhibited, which at first feels kind of liberating and good; there’s this feeling like no more smiley masks, no more pretending, which feels good, except it gets kind of seductive and dangerous, and actually it can make people worse in there—some inhibitions are good, they’re normal, he said, and part of the syndrome they call some people eventually getting institutionalized is that they get put in a nut ward at a young age or a fragile time when their sense of themselves is not really very fixed or resilient, and they start acting the way they think people in nut wards are expected to act, and after a while they really are that way, and they get caught in the system, the mental-health system, and they never really get out.’
‘And he told you that. He warned you about using uninhibited insults with the psychiatrist.’
Her eyes have changed; she puts her chin in her hand, which makes her seem even younger. ‘He told me a lot of things. A lot. We talked for like two hours the night I was in the pink room. We both laugh about it now—he talked way more than I did, which is not how it’s supposed to be done. After a while every night we were in there like clockwork, ta—’
‘You went to the isolation room?’
‘No, I was just in there that one night, and the regular case doctor, I have to admit it, he got the substitute one in some kind of disciplinary trouble for signing me in there; he said it was reactive.’ Rand stops and taps her fingers against the side of her cheek. ‘Shit, I forget what I was saying.’
Drinion looks slightly upward for an instant. ‘“Every night we were in there like clockwork.”’
‘In the conference room, after visits and whoever was freaking out because of something in visits got calmed down or medicated. We’d sit in there and talk, except he had to get up every so often to do checks on where everybody was and make sure nobody was in anybody else’s room, and make whoever was due for meds go to the meds desk. Every night on weekday nights we’d go in, and he’d do this thing he always did of filling up a Coke can with water at the fountain, he’d use a Coke can instead of a cup, and we’d sit down at the table and he’d go, “So shall we go intense tonight, Meredith, or just do some laid-back chitchat?” and I’d almost act like somebody looking at a menu and go, “Well, hmm, tonight I think I’d like to go intense, please.”’
‘Can I ask a question?’
‘Grr. Go ahead.’
‘Should I infer that intense refers to the cutting behavior and your reasons for doing it?’ Drinion asks. His hands are now on the table with the fingers laced together, which for most people causes the back to bow and slump, but with Drinion does not—his posture stays the same.
‘Negative. He was too smart for that. We didn’t talk about cutting often. That wouldn’t do any good. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could come at directly that way. What he—it’s more like he mostly just told me all these things about myself.’
One of Drinion’s interlaced fingers moves very slightly. ‘Not asked you things?’
‘Negative.’
‘And that didn’t make you angry? Presuming to tell you about yourself?’
‘The big difference is the way he was right. Just about everything he said was right.’
‘In what he told you about yourself.’
‘Look, and he did this mostly in the beginning, when he needed to establish credibility. That’s what he told me later—he knew I wouldn’t be there long, at Zeller, and he knew I needed to talk to somebody, and he needed to let me know very fast that he understood me, knew me, he wasn’t just dealing with me as a case or a problem to be figured out for his own career, which he knew was how the doctors and counselors seemed to me, which he said it didn’t matter if I was right about them or not, the point is that I believed it, it was part of my defenses. He said I was one of the most strongly defended people he’d ever seen come in there. In Zeller. Short of the outright psychotics, I mean, who were just about impregnable, but they got transferred out almost right away; he rarely had any one-on-ones with real psychotics. The psychotic thing is just defensive structures and beliefs so strong that the person can’t get out, they become the real world, and then it’s usually too late, because the structure of the brain gets changed. That person’s only hope is medication and a whole lot of pink around him at all times.’
‘He understood you as a person, you’re saying.’
‘What he did, right in the pink room, while I’m sitting there on the bunk and going oh my God there’s a drain in the floor, he right away told me two separate things about myself that I knew but nobody else knew. Nobody. I’m serious,’ Meredith Rand says. ‘It’s like, I couldn’t believe it. He was dead-on.’
‘…’
‘Now you’re wondering what the things are,’ she says.
Drinion does that very small thing with the angle of his head. ‘Are you saying you’d like me to ask you what they are?’
‘No way.’
‘Almost by definition, I doubt that you’d tell them to someone.’
‘Bingo. Right. No way. Not that they’re all that interesting,’ she says. ‘But he did. He knew them, and you can bet that got my attention. That made me sit up and take notice. How could it not?’
Drinion says: ‘I can understand that.’
‘Exactly. That he knew me, understood me, was interested in understanding. People always say that, understand, I understand you, please help us understand you.’
‘I’ve said it several times, too, while we’ve been talking,’ Drinion says.
‘Do you know how many times?’
‘Nine, though I believe only four in quite the sense that you appear to be referring to, if I understand what you mean.’
‘Is that a joke?’
‘My using the word understand again just now?’
Rand makes an exasperated expression and directs it off to one side and then the other as if there were still more people at the table with them.
Drinion says: ‘Not if I follow the sense of understand you mean, which doesn’t refer to understanding a statement or somebody’s implication but more a person, which seems to me less cognitive than a matter of empathy or I think even compassion would be the word you mean by this kind of understanding.’
‘The thing,’ she says, ‘is he really did. Use whatever word you want. Nobody knew these things he told me—one of them I don’t even think I knew, really, until he just put it out there in blunt words.’
‘This made an impression,’ Drinion says helpfully.
Rand ignores him. ‘He was a natural therapist. He said it was his calling, his art. The way painting or being able to dance really well or to sit there reading the same thing for hours on end without moving or getting distracted is other people’s calling.’
‘…’
‘Would you say you have a calling?’ the POTEX asks Shane Drinion.
‘I doubt it.’
‘He wasn’t a doctor, but when he saw somebody in there he thought he could maybe help, he’d try to help them. Otherwise he was more like a security guard, he said.’
‘…’
‘One time he said he was more just like a mirror. In the intense conversations. If he seemed mean or stupid, what it really meant was that you saw yourself as mean and stupid. If one time he struck you as smart and sensitive, it meant you were smart and sensitive that day—he just showed you what was there.
‘He looked terrible, but that was also part of the power of sitting in there with him and doing these intense bits of work. He looked so sick and washed out and delicate that you never got the idea that here was this smug, normal, healthy, rich doctor judging you and being glad he wasn’t you or just seeing you as a case to resolve. It was like really talking to somebody, with him.’
‘Anyone could tell that he made a great impression on you in this difficult time, your future husband,’ Shane Drinion says.
‘Are you being ironic?’
‘No.’
‘Are you thinking, like, here’s this messed-up seventeen-year-old falling in love with the therapist-type adult figure that she thinks is the only one that understands?’
Shane Drinion shakes his head exactly twice. ‘That’s not what I’m thinking.’ It occurs to Rand that he could conceivably be bored out of his skull and she’d have no way of telling.
‘Because that’s pathetic,’ Meredith Rand says. ‘That’s like the oldest story in the book, and however messed up you might think this is, it sure wasn’t that.’ She’s sitting up very straight now for a moment. ‘Do you know what monopsony is?’
‘I think so.’
‘What is it then?’
Shane Drinion clears his throat slightly. ‘It’s the reverse of monopoly. There’s a single buyer and multiple sellers.’
‘All right.’
‘I think bids for government contracts, such as when the Service upgraded its card readers at the La Junta center last year, are an example of a monopsonistic market.’
‘All right. Well, he taught me that one, too, although in a more of a personal context.’
‘As in a metaphor,’ Drinion says.
‘Do you see what it could have to do with loneliness?’
Another very brief moment of inward scanning. ‘I can see how it might lead to distrust, since contract-bidding situations are susceptible to rigging, dishonest cost-projections, and things like that.’
‘You’re a very literal person, did you know that?’
‘…’
‘Here’s the literal thing, then,’ Meredith Rand says. ‘Say you’re pretty, and there’s things about being pretty that you like—you get treated special, and people pay attention to you and talk about you, and if you walk in someplace you can almost feel the room change, and you like it.’
‘It’s a form of power,’ Drinion says.
‘But at the same time you also have less power,’ Meredith Rand says, ‘because the power you have is all totally connected to prettiness, and at some point you realize that the prettiness is like a kind of box you’re always in, or prison, that nobody’s ever going to see you or think about you apart from the prettiness.’
‘…’
‘It’s not like I even thought I was all that pretty,’ Meredith Rand says. ‘Especially in high school.’ She’s rolling a cigarette back and forth between her fingers but not lighting it. ‘But I sure knew everybody else thought I was pretty. Ever since like twelve, people were saying how lovely and beautiful I was, and in high school I was one of the foxes, and everybody knew who they were, and it became sort of official, socially: I was pretty, I was desirable, I had the power. Do you get this?’
‘I think so,’ Shane Drinion says.
‘Because this is what intense meant—he and I really talked about it, the prettiness. It was the first time I ever really talked about it with anybody. Especially a guy. I mean except for “You’re so beautiful, I love you” and trying to put their tongue in your ear. Like that was all you needed to hear, that you were beautiful, and you were supposed to fall over and let them boff you.’
‘…’
‘If you’re pretty,’ Meredith Rand says, ‘it can be hard to respect guys.’
‘I can understand that,’ Drinion says.
‘Because you never even get to see what they might really be like. Because the minute you’re around, they change; if they’ve decided you’re beautiful, they change. It’s like the thing in physics—if you’re there to look at the experiment, it supposedly messes up the results.’
‘There’s a paradox involved in it,’ Drinion says.
‘And except for a while you like it. You like the attention. Even if they change, you know it’s you making them change. You’re attractive, they’re attracted to you.’
‘Hence the tongues in the ear.’
‘Although with a lot of them it turns out it’s got the opposite effect. They almost avoid you. They get scared or nervous—it makes them want something, and they’re embarrassed or scared of wanting it—they can’t talk to you or even look at you, or else they start putting on a little show like Second-Knuckle Bob, this flirty sexist thing where they think they’re doing it to impress you but really it’s to impress other boys, to show they’re not afraid. And you haven’t even done or said anything to start it; all you have to do is just be there, and everybody changes. Presto change-o.’
‘It sounds taxing,’ Drinion says.
Meredith Rand lights the cigarette she’s been holding. ‘Plus other girls hate you; they don’t even know you or talk to you and they decide they hate you, just because of how the boys all react—like you’re a threat to them, or they assume you’re a stuck-up bitch without even trying to get to know you.’ She has a definite style of averting her head to exhale and then bringing it back. Most people think she’s very direct.
‘I wasn’t a ditz,’ she says. ‘I was good with figures. I won the algebra prize in tenth-grade algebra. But of course nobody cared about me being smart or good at math. Even the men teachers got all googly and nervous or pervy and flirty when I came up after or something to ask about something. Like I was a fox and there was no way anybody could ever even think to see anything more than that.
‘Listen,’ Meredith Rand says. ‘Don’t misunderstand me. It’s not like I think I’m all that pretty. I’m not saying I’m beautiful. Actually I’ve never thought I was all that beautiful. My eyebrows are too heavy, for one thing. I’m not going to go around plucking them, but they’re too heavy. And my neck is, like, twice as long as a normal person’s, when I look in the mirror.’
‘…’
‘Not that it even matters.’
‘No.’
‘No what?’
‘No, I understand it doesn’t really matter,’ Drinion says.
‘Except it does. You don’t get it. The prettiness thing—at least when you’re that age, it’s like a kind of trap. There’s a greedy part of you that really likes the attention. You’re special, you’re desirable. It’s easy to start thinking of the prettiness as you, like it’s all you’ve got, it’s what makes you special. In your designer jeans and little sweaters you can put in the dryer so they’re even tighter. Walking around like that.’ Although it’s not as if what Meredith Rand wears at the Post is effacing or dowdy. They’re professional ensembles, well within code, but many of the Post’s examiners still bite their knuckles when she goes by, especially in cold months, when the extremely dry air produces static cling.
She says: ‘The flip side being how you also start understanding that you’re really just a piece of meat. Is what you are. Really desirable meat, but also that you’ll never get taken seriously and never, like, be the president of a bank or something because no one will ever be able to see past the prettiness, the prettiness is what affects them and what makes them feel anything, and that’s all that matters to them, and it’s hard not to get sucked into that, to start, like, arranging yourself and seeing yourself the same way.’
‘You mean seeing and reacting to people through whether or not they’re attractive?’
‘No, no.’ You can see that Meredith Rand would have a hard time quitting cigarettes, since she uses the way she smokes and exhales and moves her head to convey a lot of affect. ‘I mean starting to see yourself as a piece of meat, that the only thing you’ve got is your looks and the way you affect boys, guys. You start doing it without even knowing you’re doing it. And it’s scary, because at the same time it also feels like a box; you know there’s more to you inside you because you can feel it, but nobody else will ever know—not even other girls, who either hate you or are scared of you, because you’re a monopsony, or else if they’re also the foxes or the cheerleaders they’re competing with you and feel like they have to do this whole competitive catty thing that guys don’t have any idea of, but trust me, it can be really cruel.’
The fact that one of Drinion’s nostrils is slightly larger than the other sometimes makes it look as though he’s cocking his head a little bit, even when he is not. It’s somewhat parallel to the mouth-breathing thing. Meredith Rand usually interprets expressionlessness as inattention, the way someone’s face blanks out when you’re talking and they’re pretending to listen but not really listening, but this is not the way Drinion’s expressionlessness seems. Also, it’s either her imagination or Drinion is sitting up steadily straighter and taller, because he seems to be slightly taller than when the tête-à-tête started. A collection of different kinds of old-fashioned fedoras and homburgs and various business hats glued or pinned somehow to a varnished rosewood board that had been visible on the opposite wall of Meibeyer’s over Drinion’s head is now partly obscured by the crown of his head and the slight cowlick that sticks up at his round head’s apex. Drinion is actually levitating slightly, which is what happens when he is completely immersed; it’s very slight, and no one can see that his bottom is floating slightly above the seat of the chair. One night someone comes into the office and sees Drinion floating upside down over his desk with his eyes glued to a complex return, Drinion himself unaware of the levitating thing by definition, since it is only when his attention is completely on something else that the levitation happens.
‘Which is part of the feeling of the box,’ Meredith Rand is continuing. ‘There’s the feeling, which in teenagers is really bad anyway, of feeling like nobody can really ever know you or love you for who you are because they can’t really see you and for some reason you won’t let them even though you feel like you want them to. But it’s also at the same time a feeling that you know it’s boring and immature and like a bad type of movie problem, “Boo hoo, no one can love me for who I am,” so you’re also aware that your loneliness is stupid and banal even while you’re feeling it, the loneliness, so you don’t even have any sympathy for yourself. And this is what we talked about, this is what he told me about, that he knew without me telling him: how lonely I was, and how the cutting had something to do with the prettiness and feeling like I had no right to complain but still being really unhappy at the same time believing that not being pretty seemed like it would be the end of the world, I’d just be a piece of meat nobody wanted instead of a piece of meat they did happen to want. Like I was trapped inside it, and I still really had no right to complain about it because look at all the girls who were jealous and thought no one who’s pretty could be lonely or have any problems, and even if I did complain, then all the complaining was banal, he taught me banal, and tête-à-tête, and how this can become part of the whole loneliness—the truth of saying “I’m just meat, people only care about me as beautiful, no one cares what I really am inside, I’m lonely” is totally boring and banal, like something corny in Redbook, not beautiful or unique, or special. Which was the first time I thought of the scars and the cutting as letting the unbeautiful inside truth come out, be on the outside, even if I was also hiding it under long sleeves—although your blood is really actually quite pretty if you really look at it, I mean when it first comes out, although the cut has to be very careful and fine and not too deep so the blood just more appears as a line that kind of slowly wells up, so it’s thirty seconds or more before you have to wipe because it’s starting to run.’
‘Does it hurt?’ Shane Drinion asks.
Meredith Rand exhales sharply and looks right at him. ‘What do you mean does it? I don’t do it anymore. I never have, since I met him. Because he more or less told me all this and told me the truth, that it doesn’t ultimately matter why I do it or what it, like, represents or what it’s about.’ Her gaze is very level and matter-of-fact. ‘All that matters is that I was doing it and to stop doing it. That was it. Unlike the doctors and small groups that were all about your feelings and why, as though if you knew why you did it you’d magically be able to stop. Which he said was the big lie they all bought that made doctors and standard therapy such a waste of time for people like us—they thought that diagnosis was the same as cure. That if you knew why, it would stop. Which is bullshit,’ Meredith Rand says. ‘You only stop if you stop. Not if you wait for somebody to explain it in some magic way that will presto change-o make you stop.’ She makes a sardonic flourish with her cigarette hand as she says presto change-o.
Drinion: ‘It sounds as though he really helped you.’
‘He was very blunt,’ she says. ‘It turned out being blunt is something he’s proud of—it’s part of his act that there is no act. Only I only found that out later.’
‘…’
‘You can see, of course, how having somebody have this kind of compassion and understanding of what’s really going on inside you, how this would affect somebody that thought her big problem was the impossibility of anybody seeing past the prettiness to what was inside. Would you like to know his name?’
Drinion blinks once. He doesn’t blink very often. ‘Yes.’
‘Edward. “Ed Rand, partial BS,” he’d say. So you can see why I was pretty much primed to fall in love with him.’
‘I think so.’
‘So I don’t need to spell it out,’ Meredith Rand says. ‘In a way, if he was a perv or a creep that played things that way, it would be a perfect setup for getting pretty young girls to fall for him. Work in a place that everybody comes in all mucked up and lonely and in crisis, and find the young girls, whose basic problem is probably always going to be their looks. So all he had to do, if he was smart, and he’d seen hundreds of messed-up girls come through, who starved themselves, or stole clothes from shopping malls, or ate and couldn’t stop eating, or cut on themselves, or got into drugs, or kept running away with older black guys and getting dragged back over and over again by the parents, whatever, you get the idea, but that all had the same really essential problem, each time one of them came in, no matter what they were officially in for, which was not feeling like they were really known and understood and that was the cause of their loneliness, of the constant pain they were in that made them cut, or eat, or not eat, or give blowjobs to the whole basketball team in a row out back behind the cafeteria dumpster, which is what one cheerleader I know for a total fact did all the time junior year, although she was never really quite one of the foxes because she was known as such a total slut; a lot of the foxes just hated her.’ Rand looks briefly right at Drinion to see whether there is any visible reaction to the word blowjob, which he does not appear to provide. ‘And it’d be easy to get them in the conference room, and to tell them some stuff about themselves that totally shocked and amazed them because they hadn’t ever told anybody about it and yet it was totally easy to spot and know about because at the core it was all the same.’
Drinion asks: ‘Did you tell him this, during the therapy sessions that were designated as intense?’
Rand shakes her head as she extinguishes the Benson & Hedges cigarette. ‘They weren’t therapy sessions. He hated that term, all that terminology. They were just tête-à-têtes, talking.’ Again she uses the same number of stabs and partial rolls to extinguish it, although with less force than when she’s appeared impatient or angry with Shane Drinion. She says: ‘That was all he said it seemed like I needed, just to talk to somebody with no bullshit, which was what the Zeller Center doctors didn’t realize, or like they couldn’t realize it because then the whole structure would come down, that here the doctors had spent four million years in medical school and residency and the insurance companies were paying all this money for diagnosis and OT and therapy protocols, it was all an institutional structure, and once things became institutionalized then it all became this artificial, like, organism and started trying to survive and serve its own needs just like a person, only it wasn’t a person, it was the opposite of a person, because there was nothing inside it except the will to survive and grow as an institution—he said just look at Christianity and the whole Christian Church.’
‘But my question was whether you talked to him about your possible suspicion, the possibility that he didn’t really understand you, and care, but was a creep?’
Sometimes throughout the conversation Meredith Rand looks down critically at her fingernails, which are almond-shaped and neither too short nor too long, and painted a lustrous red. Shane Drinion looks at her hands only when Rand does, as a rule.
‘I didn’t have to,’ Rand says. ‘He brought it up. Edward did. He said given my problem it was only a matter of time before it occurred to me that maybe he didn’t understand and care but only understood me the way a mechanic understands a machine—this was a time in the second week in the nut ward that I was having all these dreams about different kinds of machinery, with gears and dials, which the doctors and so-called therapists wanted to talk about and get me to see the symbolism of, which he and I both laughed about because it was so obvious an idiot could have seen it, which he said wasn’t the doctors’ fault or that they were stupid, that was just the way the machine of the institution of in-patient therapy worked, and the doctors had no more choice about how much importance they put on the dreams than a little piece of machinery does about doing the little task or movement it’s been put there to do over and over again as part of the larger operation of the larger machine.’ Rand’s rep at the REC is that she’s sexy but crazy and a serious bore, just won’t shut up if you get her started; they argue about whether they ultimately envy her husband or pity him. ‘But he brought it up before I had a chance to even start thinking about it.’ She unsnaps her white vinyl case but does not extract a cigarette from it. ‘Which I have got to say was kind of surprising, because by this time I was eighteen, and I’d had such bad experiences with creeps and pervs and jocks and college boys’ “I love you” on the first date that I was very suspicious and cynical about guys’ double motives, and normally the minute this sickly little orderly started paying attention to me I’d have my defensive shields way up and be considering all kinds of creepy, depressing possibilities.’
Drinion’s red forehead crinkles for just a moment. ‘Were you eighteen, or seventeen?’
‘Oh,’ Meredith Rand says. ‘Right.’ As she acts younger, she begins to laugh sometimes in a fast and toneless way, like a reflex. ‘I was just eighteen. I had my eighteenth birthday on my third day in Zeller. My dad and mother even came out and brought a cake and noisemakers during visiting hours and tried to have this celebration, like whoopee, which was so embarrassing and depressing I didn’t know what to do, like, a week ago you’re hysterical about some cuts and put me in the bin and now you want to pretend it’s happy birthday, let’s ignore the girl screaming in the pink room while I blow out the candles and you fix the elastic of the hat under your chin, so I just played along because I didn’t know what to say about how totally weird it was for them to be acting like, happy birthday, Meredith, whoopee.’ She is kneading the flesh of one arm with the other arm’s hand as she recounts this. Sometimes, as Drinion sits with his hands laced on the tabletop before him, he changes having one thumb or the other be the thumb on top. His former glass of beer sits empty except for a semicircle of foamy material along the bottom’s edge. Meredith Rand now has three different narrow straws she can choose to chew on; one of them is already quite thoroughly chewed and flattened at one end. She says:
‘So he brought it up. He said it was probably going to occur to me on some level soon, so if I wanted it really intense we might as well talk about it. He’d always drop little bombs like this, and then while I sat there like’:—she forms an exaggerated taken-aback expression—‘he’d groan and swing his feet around off the table and go out with his clipboard to do checks—he had to officially check on everybody every quarter hour and note down where they were and make sure nobody was making themselves barf or looping pillowcases together to hang themselves with—and he’d go out and leave me there in the conference room with nothing to look at or do, waiting for him to come back, which tended to take him a long time because he never felt well, and if there was no nursing supervisor or anybody around to watch him he walked very slow and used to lean against the wall every so often to catch his breath. He was white as a ghost. Plus he took all these diuretics, which made him have to pee all the time. Except when I asked him about it all he’d say is that it was his own private business and we weren’t in here talking about him, it didn’t matter about him because all he really was was a kind of mirror for me.’
‘So you didn’t know that he had cardiomyopathy.’
‘All he’d say was that his health was a mess but that the advantage of being a physical mess was that he looked like exactly as much of a mess as he really was, there was no way to hide it or pretend he was less of a mess than he felt like. Which was very different than people like me; he said the only way for most people to show the mess was to fall apart and get put someplace like this, like Zeller, where it was undeniably obvious to you and your family and everybody else that you were a mess, so there was at least a certain relief to being put in the nut ward, but he said given the realities here, meaning insurance and money and the way institutions like Zeller worked, given the realities it was almost sure that I wouldn’t be in here that long, and what was I going to do when I got back out there in the real world where there were all these razor blades and X-Acto knives and long-slaved shirts. Long-sleeved shirts.’
‘Can I ask a question?’
‘You bet.’
‘Did you react? When he brought up the idea that his helping you and intense conversations with you were connected to your attractiveness?’
Rand snaps and unsnaps her white cigarette case. ‘I said something like, so you’re saying you’d be in here with me all concerned and interested if I was fat with zits and a, like, big old jaw? And he said he couldn’t say one way or the other, he’d worked with all kinds of people that came through, and some were plain girls and some were pretty, he said it had more to do with how defended people were. If they were too defended in terms of their real problems—or if they were just outright psycho, and when they looked at him they saw some shiny terrifying four-faced statue or something—then he couldn’t do anything. It was only if he felt a kind of vibe off the person where he felt like he could maybe understand them and maybe offer real interpersonal talking and help with them instead of just the inevitable doctor-and-institution thing.’
‘Did you accept that as an answer to your question?’ Drinion says, without any kind of incredulous or judging expression that Meredith Rand can see.
‘No, I said something sarcastic like blah blah blah whatever, but he said that wasn’t his real answer, he wanted to answer the question because he knew how important it was, he could totally understand the anxiety and suspicion of would he really even care and pay attention if I wasn’t pretty, because he said in actuality this was my whole core problem, the one that would follow me when I got out of Zeller, and that I had to find out how to deal with or I’d be back in here or worse. Then he said it was close to lights-out and we had to quit for today, and I was, like, you’re telling me there’s this major core problem I have to deal with or else and then that’s it, time for noddy blinkums? I was so ticked off. And then the next two or three nights he wasn’t even there, and I was totally spasming out, and there was only this other guy there from the weekends, and the day staff won’t ever tell you anything, all they see is that you’re agitated and they report that you’re agitated but nobody actually cares about what you’re agitated about, no one wants to even know what your question is, if you’re an in-patient you’re not a human being and they don’t have to tell you anything.’ Rand makes her face assume a look of frustrated distance. ‘It turned out he’d been in the hospital—the real hospital; when the inflammation gets bad then the heart doesn’t pump the blood out all the way, and it’s a little like what they call congestive heart failure; they have to put you on oxygen and heavy-duty anti-inflammatories.’
‘So you were concerned,’ Drinion says.
‘But at the time I didn’t even know that, all I knew was he wasn’t there, and then it was the weekend, so it was a long time before he got back, and at first when he did I was totally ticked and wouldn’t even talk to him in the hall.’
‘You’d been left hanging.’
‘Well,’ Rand says, ‘I took it personally that he’d gotten me all involved and said all these heavy therapeutic things and then disappeared, like it was all just a sadistic game, and when he got back the next week and asked me in the TV room, I just pretended I was into the TV show and pretended he wasn’t even there.’
‘You didn’t know that he’d been in the hospital,’ Drinion says.
‘After I found out how sick he was, I felt pretty bad about it; I felt like I acted like a spoiled child or some girl that was jilted for the prom. But I also realized I cared about him, I felt like I almost sort of needed him, and except for my dad and a couple friends when I was little I couldn’t even remember how long it had been since I felt like I really cared and needed somebody. Because of the prettiness thing.’
Meredith Rand says: ‘Have you ever only found out you cared about somebody when they’re not around and you’re like Oh my God, they’re not around, now what am I going to do?’
‘Not really.’
‘Well anyway, but it made an impression. What came out when I finally said oh all right whatever and started talking to him in the conference room again is that maybe I’d felt like I’d ticked him off and sort of drove him away when I asked him if he’d be in here doing the intense tête-à-tête thing with me if I was fat and cross-eyed. Like that it ticked him off, or that he’d finally decided I was so cynical and suspicious of men only being interested in me because of the prettiness thing that he’d finally figured out that he wasn’t going to be able to con me into thinking he actually cared enough that he’d get to boff me or even just feed his ego that here was this so-called beautiful girl that got into him and cared and wrote his name over and over in big loopy cursive in her diary or whatever his trip was. I think all this ugly stuff came out because I was mad because he’d disappeared like that, I thought, and just ditched me and left me here. But he was pretty good about it; he said he could see how I’d feel that way, considering what my real problem was, which then for a while after that I think he let me think he hadn’t come in for work for those days just so I could start to see the problem for myself, to figure out what it was and start to see it for what it was.’
‘Did you demand any sort of explanation?’ Drinion asks.
‘A bunch of times. The weird thing is that now, so much later on, I can’t remember for sure if he eventually spat it out or if he got me to figure it out for myself,’ Meredith Rand says, now looking ever so slightly up in order to meet Drinion’s eyes, which if she’d think about it is rather strange, given their respective heights and places at the table, ‘the so-called core problem.’ Drinion’s forehead crinkles slightly as he looks at her. She rotates the fingers of one hand in a procedural or summarizing way: ‘Subject, who is seen as very pretty, wants to be liked for more than her prettiness, and is angry that she isn’t liked or cared about for reasons that don’t have anything to do with her prettiness. But in fact, everything about her is filtered through her prettiness for her— she is so angry and suspicious that she couldn’t even accept real, true, no-agenda caring even if it’s offered to her, because deep down inside she, the subject herself, can’t believe that anything except prettiness or sex appeal is the motive for anybody’s caring. Except her parents,’ she inserts, ‘who are nice but not too bright, and anyway they’re her parents—we’re talking about people out in the world.’ She makes a summing-up gesture that may or may not be ironic. ‘Subject is really her own core problem, and only she can solve it, and only if she quits wanting to be lonely and feeling sorry for myself and going “Poor me, I’m so lonely, nobody understands how bad I hurt, boo hoo.”’
‘To be honest, I was asking about a different explanation.’ By now, Drinion appears considerably taller than he had when the tête-à-tête started. The rows of hats on the wall behind him are almost completely obscured. It is also odd to have someone stare into your eyes this continuously without feeling challenged or nervous, or even excited. It will occur to Rand later, as she’s driven home, that during the tête-à-tête with Drinion she’d felt sensuously aroused in a way that had little to do with being excited or nervous, that she’d felt the surface of the chair against her bottom and back and the backs of her legs, and the material of her skirt, and the sides of her shoes against the sides of her feet in hose whose microtextured weave she could also feel, and the feel of her tongue against her teeth’s rear and palate, the vent’s air against her hairline and the room’s other air against her face and arms and the taste of cigarette smoke’s residue. At one or two points she’d even felt she could feel the exact shape of her eyeballs against her lids’ insides when she blinked—she was aware when she blinked. The only kind of experience she could associate with it involved their cat that she’d had when she was a girl before it got hit by a car and the way she could sit with the cat in her lap and stroke the cat and feel the rumble of the cat’s purring and feel every bit of the texture of the cat’s warm fur and the muscle and bone beneath that, and that she could sit for long periods of time stroking the cat and feeling it with her eyes half-shut as if she was spaced out or stuporous-looking but had felt, in fact, like she was the opposite of stuporous—she felt totally aware and alive, and at the same time when she sat slowly stroking the cat with the same motion over and over it was like she forgot her name and address and almost everything else about her life for ten or twenty minutes, even though it wasn’t like spacing out at all, and she loved that cat. She missed the feel of its weight, which was like nothing else, neither heavy nor light, and at times for almost the next two or three days she felt like she feels now, like the cat.
‘You mean of the wanting to boff me thing?’
Drinion: ‘I think so.’
Meredith Rand: ‘He said he was basically a dead man, he used the words dead man and walking dead, so the point is he couldn’t be into me in that way, he said. He wouldn’t have the physical energy to try to get in my pants even if he’d wanted to.’
Shane Drinion: ‘He told you about his condition, then.’
Meredith Rand: ‘Not in so many words; he said it was really none of my business except in how it bore down on my problem. And I said my suspicion was starting to be that he was dropping all these hints about “my problem, my problem” but not just spitting out what it was supposed to be, to sort of string me along for some reason, and that I wasn’t going to pretend I knew exactly what the reason was or what he wanted but it was hard not to think on some level it was creepy or pervy, which I simply flat-out told him. I’d quit being polite by then.’
‘I’m a little confused,’ Drinion says. ‘This was all before he’d simply stated what he believed your main problem was?’
Meredith Rand shakes her head, though in response to what is now doubly unclear. One of the examiners’ complaints is that she goes off on these long stories but at some point loses the thread and it’s nearly impossible not to drift off or zone out when you can’t understand what the hell she’s getting at anymore. Several of the single posted examiners have decided she’s simply crazy, great to look at from a distance but definitely a wide-berth-type girl, especially on breaks, when every moment of diversion is precious, and she can be worse than the work itself. She is saying: ‘By this time I was either getting hit on or rapped to by every guy in Zeller, from the day attendant to the men on the second floor when we came down for OT, which was a major drag in all kinds of ways. Although he did point out that if it bummed me out so much, why did I put mascara on even if I was in a mental hospital. Which you have to admit was a valid thing to point out.’
‘Yes.’
She is grinding the heel of her hand into one eye, to signify either fatigue or an attempt to stay on track in the story, although Drinion gives no sign of being bored or impatient. ‘Plus also by around this time he said the Zeller doctors started saying that my so-called attachment to this one attendant—they also saw all the rapping and sniffing around everybody was doing—all the intense solo tête-à-têtes were starting to look dependent or unhealthy, and not saying anything to me about it but asking him all kinds of questions and basically starting to give him a really hard time, so we started having to wait for everybody to get all engrossed at TV time and then go talk in the stairwell just outside the ward, where it wasn’t so public, where he’d usually lie down on the cement of the landing with his feet up on the second or third stair up, which by this time he admitted wasn’t for his back but he needed the elevation to keep his circulation going. So we ended up spending a lot of the first couple days out in the stairwell talking about the whole business of my suspicions about what he wanted from me and why he was doing this, around and around, and he did tell me a little more about himself and getting cardiomyopathy in college, but he also kept saying OK, he’d talk about all this as long as I wanted to, but that it was kind of a vicious circle because anything he said I could be suspicious of and attribute some kind of secondary agenda to if I wanted to, and I might think it was all honest and open but it wasn’t really intense or efficacious, in his opinion, it was more like going around and around inside the problem instead of really looking at the problem, which he said because he was a walking dead man and not really part of the institution of the nut ward he felt like maybe he was the only person there who’d really tell me the truth about my problem, which he said was basically that I needed to grow up.’
Meredith Rand pauses here and looks at Shane Drinion in anticipation of his asking what that diagnosis was supposed to mean, exactly; but he does not ask. He appears to have become reconciled to something, or to have decided to accept the way Meredith Rand remembers the story on her own terms, or to have concluded that trying to impose a certain kind of order on her side of the tête-à-tête was going to have the opposite effect.
She is saying, ‘And naturally the “grow up” thing ticked me off, and I told him to go sit on something sharp, but I didn’t really mean it, because by around this time he’d said also that the word was starting to come down that I was going to get discharged soon, the treatment team was starting to talk about it, even though of course nobody ever thought to tell me anything about what was going on, and that my mother had been trying to set up outpatient counseling and trying to get one of the doctors to keep seeing me in his private practice, which was very full and also not totally covered by my dad’s insurance, so the whole thing was a bureaucratic nightmare, and it would take some time, but it was starting to sink into me that this wasn’t forever, that by as early as maybe next week or the week after I wouldn’t be seeing him or having intense conversations with him anymore, or even maybe ever see him again—I realized I didn’t know where he lived or even his last name, for Christ’s sake. This all sort of hit me, and I start freaking out when I think about it, because I’d already got a taste of what a couple days of suddenly not getting to talk to him or know where he was was like, and I’m freaking out, and in my mind I’m toying with the idea of sharpening something and doing some cutting that I didn’t even really feel like doing, just so I’d get kept in the nut ward a little longer, which I knew was completely nuts.’ She looks up very quickly at Drinion to see whether he’s reacting to this information. ‘Which was crazy, and actually I think he knew this was going on, he knew how important he’d gotten to be to me by then, I think, so he had extra leverage or ammo to use to tell me to just cut the shit—I’d be sitting on the stairway up to Four and he’d be lying on his back at the bottom of the stairway with his feet up right below me, so I spent all this time looking at his shoe soles, which were like Kmart shoes and the soles were plastic—and that “grow up” meant now, right this second, and quit being childish, because it would kill me. He said the girls that came through Zeller were all the same, and none of us had any idea of what being a grown-up was. Which was totally condescending, and normally the totally wrong thing to say to an eighteen-year-old. So there was this little argument about that. His point was that being childish wasn’t the same thing as being like a child, he said, because watch a real child play or stroke a cat or listen to a story and you’ll see it’s like the opposite of what we were all doing there in Zeller.’ Shane Drinion is leaning slightly forward. His bottom is now almost 1.75 inches off the chair seat; his work shoes’ gumlike soles, darkened at the perimeter by the same process that darkens pencils’ erasers, swing slightly just above the tile floor. Were it not for the sport coat hanging off the back of his chair, Beth Rath and others would be able to see light through the substantial gap between the seat of his chair and his slacks. ‘It’s more like he was explaining than arguing,’ Rand says. ‘He said there is a particular kind of stage of life where you get cut off from the, like, unself-conscious happiness and magic of childhood—he said only seriously disturbed or autistic children are without this childhood joy—but later in life and puberty it’s possible to leave that childhood freedom and completeness behind but still remain totally immature. Immature in the sense of waiting or wanting some magical daddy or rescuer to see you and really know and understand you and care as much about you as a child’s parents do, and save you. Save you from yourself. He also kept yawning a lot and hitting his shoes together, and I’d watch the soles go back and forth. He said this is how immaturity shows up in young women and girls; in men it’s somewhat different in how it looks but really it’s all the same, which is wanting to be distracted from what you’ve lost and fixed and saved by somebody. Which is pretty banal, it’s like something out of a doctor’s textbook, and I go so this is my core problem? This is what I’ve been stringing along waiting for? And he goes no, that’s everybody’s core problem, and it’s why girls are so obsessed with prettiness and whether they can attract somebody and arouse enough love in that person to save them. My core problem, he said, and this connects to the core problem I told you about just now, was the neat little trap I’d made for myself to ensure that I never really had to grow up and so I could stay immature and waiting forever for somebody to save me because I’d never be able to find out that nobody else can save me because I’d made it impossible for me to get what I was so convinced I needed and deserved, so I could always be angry and I could always get to go around thinking that my real problem was that no one could see or love the real me the way I needed so I’d always have my problem to sit and hold and stroke on and make believe was the real problem.’ Rand looks up sharply at Shane Drinion. ‘Does that seem banal?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It kind of did to me,’ Meredith Rand says. ‘I told him that was incredibly helpful and now I knew just what to do when I got discharged from Zeller, which was click my heels together and transform diagnosis into cure, and how could I ever repay him.’
Drinion says, ‘You were being deeply sarcastic.’
‘I was pissed!’ Meredith Rand says, a bit loudly. ‘I told him lo and behold it looked like it turned out he was just like the diagnosis-is-cure doctors in their nice suits, except of course his diagnosis was also insulting, which he could call honesty and get extra jollies hurting people’s feelings. I was just so pissed! And he laughed and said he wished I could see myself right now—he could see me because he was lying down and I was standing right over him, because every like fifteen minutes or so I had to help him up so he could sneak back in out of the hallway and go around with his clipboard and do checks. He said I looked like a little child that just had its toy taken away.’
‘Which probably made you even angrier,’ Drinion says.
‘He said something like all right then, OK, he’d explain it like he was talking to a child, to somebody so locked into the problem that she can’t even see that it’s her problem and not just the way the world is. I wanted to be liked and known for more than just the prettiness. That I wanted people to look past the prettiness thing and the sexual thing and see who I was, like as a person, and I felt really mad and sorry for myself that people didn’t.’
Meredith Rand, in the tavern, looks briefly up at Drinion. ‘Didn’t look past the surface,’ he says, to signify that he understands what she’s saying.
She cocks her head. ‘But in reality everything was the surface.’
‘Your surface?’
‘Yes, because under the surface were just all these feelings and conflicts about the surface, and anger, about how I looked and the effect on people I had, and really all there was inside was this constant tantrum about how I wasn’t getting saved and it was because of my prettiness, which he said if you think about it is really unattractive—nobody wants to get close to somebody who’s in the middle of this constant tantrum. Who’d want that?’ Rand makes a sort of ironic ta-da gesture in the air. ‘So, he said, I’d actually set it up so that the only reason anybody would be attracted to me as a person was that I was pretty, which was exactly the thing that made me so angry and lonely and sad.’
‘That sounds like a psychological trap.’
‘His comparison was he compared it to making a kind of machine that gave you an electric shock every time you said “Ow!” Of course, he knew I’d been having the machine dreams. I know I kept just looking at him, giving him this death-ray look that all the foxes in school get good at giving people, like they’re just supposed to melt away and die if you look at them like that. He was lying down with his feet up on the stairs as he’s saying all this. His lips were a little bit blue, the cardiomyopathy was getting worse all the time, and the Zeller stairways had those horrid fluorescent tube light things in the stairwell that made him look worse; he wasn’t even pale as much as gray, with this kind of frothy paste on his lips, because he couldn’t sip his little can of water when he was lying down on his back.’ Her eyes look like she’s really seeing him again in situ in the stairwell at Zeller. To tell the truth, he looked gross to me, scary, repulsive, like a corpse, or somebody in one of those pictures of people in stripes in concentration camps. The weird thing is that I cared about him at the same time I found him gross. He grossed me out,’ she says. ‘And that I was so deep in my problem that I couldn’t accept real, genuine, nonsexual or nonromantic or non-prettiness-type interest in me even if it was offered to me—he was talking about himself, which I knew, even though he didn’t spell it out; we’d gone over that ground for days and days before, and time was running out, we both knew. I’d be getting discharged and I’d never see him again. But I said some pretty horrible things.’
‘You’re referring to the stairwell,’ Shane Drinion says.
‘Because deep down inside, he said, I only saw myself in terms of the prettiness. I saw myself as so mediocre and banal inside that I couldn’t imagine anybody except my parents being interested in me for anything except what I looked like, as a fox. I was so angry, he said, that all anybody cared about or paid any attention to was the prettiness, but he said that was a smoke screen, theater of the human mind, that what really bothered me so much was I felt the same way, boys and men were treating me the same sort of way I really treated myself, and in reality it was really myself I was angry at except I couldn’t see it—I projected it onto the pervs whistling on the street or the sweaty boys trying to boff me or the other girls deciding I’m a bitch because I’m stuck up about the prettiness.’
There is a brief moment of silence, meaning nothing but the noise of pinball and the baseball game and the sounds of people unwinding.
‘Is this boring?’ she asks Drinion abruptly. She’s unaware of how she’s looking at Drinion as she asks this. For just a moment she appears to be almost a different person. It has suddenly occurred to Meredith Rand that Shane Drinion might be one of those ingratiating but ultimately shallow people who could seem to be paying attention while in fact allowing their attention to wander hill and dale all over the place, including possibly to considering how he wouldn’t be sitting here nodding politely and listening to this incredibly boring dribble, narcissistic dribble, if it didn’t afford him a chance to look directly at Meredith’s bottomless green eyes and exquisite bone structure, plus a bit of visible cleavage, since she’d taken off her flounce and unbuttoned her top button the minute the 5:00 buzzer had sounded.
‘Is it? Is this boring?’
Drinion responds: ‘The major part of it isn’t, no.’
‘What part of it is boring?’
‘Boring isn’t a very good term. Certain parts you tend to repeat, or say over again only in a slightly different way. These parts add no new information, so these parts require more work to pay attention to, alth—’
‘Like what parts? What is it that you think I keep telling over and over?’
‘I wouldn’t call it boring, though. It’s more that attending to these parts requires work, although it wouldn’t be fair to call that effort unpleasant. It’s that listening to the parts that do add new information or insights, these parts compel attention in a way that doesn’t require effort.’
‘What, is it that I keep going on and on about how supposedly beautiful I am?’
‘No,’ Drinion says. He cocks his head slightly. ‘In fact, to be honest, in those parts where you do repeat the same essential point or information in a slightly different way, the underlying motive, which I get the feeling is a concern that what you’re imparting might be unclear or uninteresting and must get recast and resaid in many different ways to assure yourself that the listener really understands you—this is interesting, and somewhat emotional, and it coheres in an interesting way with the surface subject of what Ed, in the story you’re telling, is teaching you, and so in that respect even the repetitive or redundant elements compel interest and require little conscious effort to pay attention to, at least so far as I’m concerned.’
Meredith Rand extracts another cigarette. ‘You sound like you’re reading off a card or something.’
‘I’m sorry it seems that way. I was trying to explain my answer to your question, because I got the sense you were hurt by my answer, and I felt that a fuller explanation would prevent the hurt. Or obviate it if you were angry. In my view, there was just a misunderstanding based on a miscommunication around the word boring.’
Her smile is both mocking and not. ‘So I’m not the only one who’s worried about misunderstanding and keeps trying to head off misunderstanding for emotional reasons.’ But she can tell he is sincere; he is neither yanking her around nor kissing butt. Meredith can feel it. There is a feeling that comes with sitting across from Shane Drinion and having his eyes and attention on you. It isn’t excitement, but it is intense, a little bit like standing near the high-voltage transformer park south of Joliet Street.
‘Can I ask,’ Drinion says, ‘is it projection when you project emotions about yourself onto other people? Or is that displacement?’
She makes another face. ‘He hated those kinds of words, actually. He said they were part of the self-nourishing institution of the mental-health system. He said even the word was contradictory—mental-health system. This was the next night, in the service elevator now, because somebody on the stairs on some other floor heard our voices the night before because the stairwell was all cement and metal and echoey, and Ed got ragged on somehow by the nursing supervisor for encouraging my unhealthy attachment to him that they’d gotten the idea of from how upset I was the time when he was out for two days—it turned out he was right on the edge of getting fired, mainly because he’d started missing the fifteen-minute checks sometimes and one girl was putting her finger down her throat and throwing up dinner and somebody found some of the throw-up and Ed had missed it because he’d been lying in the stairwell and it was harder to get up from lying all the way down with his feet on the stairs, even if I helped him up, and he’d blown off getting up to do checks. Some of the girls had also gotten all bitchy about us having conversations, like I was the favorite or something, and started a whole rumor with the treatment teams that I was always pretending I had to talk secretly to him and dragging him off and trying to make out with him or whatever. A couple of those girls were just beyond horrible, they were such bitches I’d never seen anything like it.’
‘…’
‘And it was also the day I got discharged, or got told that I was getting discharged the next day; my parents had worked it out and there were about seven million papers to sign the next day and then I was going home. There’d been this whole thing with my mom getting some doctor to sign off on outpatient counseling, blah blah. Nobody used the service elevator at night after the supper trays, so he opened it up and we went in there and he sat on the floor, the floor had a metal pattern thing and you couldn’t lie down. It stunk, it was worse than the stairwell.
‘He said it was the last night, the last conversation, and when I said I wanted intense he said it was showtime, we probably wouldn’t ever meet or see each other after this. I said what did he mean. I was totally freaking out, though. I was the one with double motives. It was showtime. I knew I couldn’t pull some kind of scam so I could stay, I knew he’d see through that, he’d just laugh at me. But I was ready to say I had romantic feelings—that I was attracted to him, even though I felt like I really wasn’t, sexually, even though later on it turned out I was. I just couldn’t admit it to myself, how I felt about him, because of my problem. Although I have to say now I’m not so sure,’ Meredith Rand says. ‘Being married is totally different than being seventeen and in total identity crisis and idealizing somebody that seems to really see you and care.’ She looks far more like herself now. ‘But he was the first guy that it felt like told me the truth, that didn’t just start having double motives and start performing or being all sweaty and intimidated and was willing to really see me and know me and just tell the truth about what he saw. And he really did know me—remember, he told me all those things about my mom and the neighbor that nobody knew.’ Her face hardens again, somewhat, or tightens, as she looks directly at Drinion, holding the cigarette but not lighting it. ‘Is this one of the parts that you said I repeat over and over?’
Drinion shakes his head a little bit and then waits for Meredith Rand to continue. The hyperattractive POTEX continues looking at him.
Drinion says: ‘No. I think the original subject of the story was you getting married. Getting married obviously assumes a mutual attraction and romantic emotions, so your first mention of a willingness to acknowledge romantic attraction is new information, and very relevant.’ His expression hasn’t changed at all.
‘So it’s not boring.’
‘No.’
‘And you’ve never had romantic attraction feelings yourself.’
‘Not that I’m aware of, no.’
‘And if you ever had them, wouldn’t you be aware of them?’
Drinion: ‘I think so, yes.’
‘So your answer was a little bit slippery, wasn’t it?’
‘I suppose it was,’ Drinion says. Later she’d consider that he didn’t seem taken aback at all. It seemed like he was merely absorbing information and adding it to himself. And that (Rand wouldn’t consider this so much as just remember it as part of the sensuous memory of her making a bit of fun of Drinion and the odd way he responded whenever she did this, which she could more or less at will, make fun of him, because in certain ways he was a total nerd and dweeb) the display of different kinds of hats on the rear wall was now completely obscured except for the very tip of the bill of a fisherman’s cap in the upper row.
‘Well, but anyway,’ Meredith Rand says. She has had her chin in the same hand that holds the unlit Benson & Hedges, which looks like the opposite of comfortable. ‘So I do know that that last night, in the elevator, I wasn’t fully listening to him and, like, engaging with him on what he was telling me, because I was wrestling with all these inner feelings and conflicts about attraction to him and also totally freaking out about hearing that I’d never see him again, because the deal was that I was set up for outpatient counseling but that was on the second floor where all the doctors had their real offices, and he was only on on nights on the third floor, which was a locked ward. Just the idea that I didn’t know where he lived freaked me out. Plus I knew he might get fired soon, because he could barely even do checks anymore, and there’d been trouble with one of the vomiters that had been vomiting and he hadn’t checked her, plus I knew he hadn’t told the Zeller people about his health thing, the cardiomyopathy, which had been more or less under control when they first hired him, it sounded like, but had gotten worse and worse—’
‘He still hadn’t told you about the cardiomyopathy, though.’
‘Right, but whatever it was, the Zeller people didn’t know about it, and they just thought that he didn’t take care of himself very well, or he was hungover or lazy, something terrible. So I kept spacing out and thinking about what if I took my shirt off and, like, made out with him right here, would he let me or would he be grossed out or laugh at me, and how could I get him to see me again and still have intense conversations after I got out and had to go back to Mom and Central Catholic, and what if I told him I loved him, and what if he died after I got out and I didn’t even know he died because I didn’t know who he was or where he lived. It occurred to me I didn’t even know how he really felt about me as me and not some girl he was helping, like did he think I was interesting, or smart, or pretty. It was so hard to think that somebody that seemed to understand me so well and tell me the truth didn’t care for me in that special way.’
‘You mean having romantic feelings.’
Rand shrugs a little with her eyebrows. ‘He was a guy, after all. So… and then it occurred to me that I was sort of doing just what he said my core problem was—thinking about him and not losing him and that he could save me and that the way to keep him was through sexual feelings because that’s all I had.
‘So then I know at some point he gave me a quiz about the overall topics we’d covered. It was both a joke and not.’ She lights the cigarette, finally. ‘Later on, he confessed it was because he thought he was really dying from this spell of cardiomyopathy—it turned out there were whole days at a time that he couldn’t catch his breath, like he was running even when he was just lying there; his lips were blue for a reason—and he said he’d been pretty sure he wouldn’t ever see me again and be able to tell if he’d been any help, he wanted to reassure himself that he’d helped somebody a little before he died. And of course on my end I was freaking out, I couldn’t figure out whether it would be better to ace the quiz or flunk it, in terms of getting to see him again. Even though he pretended the whole quiz was a joke, like I was a kindergartner getting quizzed by a kindergarten teacher. He was really good at being serious and making fun of himself at the same time—it’s one reason I loved him.’
Drinion: ‘Loved?’
‘Like, question one: What have we learned about cutting ourself? And I said, like, we learned that it doesn’t matter why I cut or what the psychological machinery is behind the cutting, like if it’s projecting self-hatred or whatever. Exteriorizing the interior. We’ve learned all that matters is to not do it. To cut it out. Nobody else can make me cut it out; only I can decide to stop it. Because whatever the institutional reason, it’s hurting myself, it’s me being mean to myself, which was childish. It was not treating yourself with any respect. The only way you can be mean to yourself is if you deep down expect somebody else is going to gallop up and save you, which is a child’s fantasy. Reality meant nobody else was for sure going to be nice to me or treat me with any respect—that was the point of his thing about growing up, realizing that—and nobody else was for sure going to see me or treat me the way I wanted to be seen, so it was my job to make sure to see myself and treat myself like I was really worthwhile. It’s called being responsible instead of childish. The real responsibilities are to myself. And if liking my looks was part of that and part of what I thought was deep-down worthwhile, that was OK. I could like being pretty without making prettiness the only thing I had going for me, or feeling sorry for myself if people spazzed out about the prettiness. That was my answer to the quiz.’
Shane Drinion: ‘As I understand it, though, your actual experience is that someone else was being nice to you and treating you as worthwhile.’
Rand smiles in a way that makes it seem as though she’s smiling in spite of herself. She’s also smoking her cigarette in a more thorough, sensuous way. ‘Well, yes, that’s what I was actually thinking about, standing there in the elevator and looking down at him and answering his quiz, which I did sincerely, but secretly I was totally freaking out. The truth is I felt like in reality he was just what he was saying was impossible and childish, he was exactly the other person he was saying I’d never really find. I felt like he loved me.’
‘So there is a very intense emotional conflict going on,’ Shane Drinion says.
Rand holds her hands to the sides of her head and makes a quick face that mimics someone having some kind of nervous breakdown. ‘I was telling him about forgetting about other people and why they were or weren’t attracted and if they really cared and just being decent to myself, treating myself like I was worthwhile, loving myself in a grown-up way—and it was all true, I really had learned it, but I was also saying it all for him, because it’s what he wanted me to say, so he could feel like he’d really helped me. But if I said what he wanted me to say, would it mean he could leave and I’d never see him again, and he’d never miss me, because he’d think I was OK and going to be OK? But I still said it. I knew if I said I loved him or stripped down and kissed him right there, he’d think I was still in the childish problem, he’d think I still mixed up being treated like a valuable worthwhile person with sex and romantic feelings, and he’d think he wasted his time and it was hopeless, he’d think it was hopeless and he hadn’t reached me, and I couldn’t do that to him—if he was going to die or get fired then at least I could let him have this, the knowledge that he’d helped me, even though I really did feel like I was maybe in love with him, or needed him.’ She puts out her cigarette without any of the previous stabbing aspect, almost sort of tenderly, as if thinking tenderly of something else. ‘I all of a sudden felt like: Oh my God, this is what people mean when they go “I’ll die without you, you’re my whole life,” you know, “Can’t live, if living is without you,”’ Meredith Rand accompanying this last bit to the tune of Harry Nilsson’s ‘Can’t Live (If Living Is Without You).’ ‘All the terrible country songs my dad used to listen to in his shop in the garage, it seemed like every one of them was about somebody talking to some lover they’d lost and why and how they couldn’t live without them, how terrible their life was now, and drinking all the time because it hurt so terribly to be without them, that I could never stand because I thought they were so banal and I never said anything but I couldn’t believe he could listen to it all without almost barfing…. Actually he said if you listen to these songs and change the you to me, like, you understand that what they’re really singing about is losing some part of themself or betraying themself over and over for what they think other people want until they’re just dead inside and don’t even know what me means, which is why the only way they can think of it and why they’re feeling so dead and sad is to think of it as needing somebody else and not being able to live without them, this other person—which by some coincidence is the exact situation of a teeny baby, that without somebody to hold it and feed it and take care of it, it’ll die, literally, which he said is not such a coincidence at all, really.’
Drinion’s forehead is ever so slightly wrinkled with thought. ‘I’m confused. Ed explained the true meaning of country-and-western songs in the elevator? So you told him about the lyrics and now understanding the lyrics’ sentiments?’
Rand is looking around, possibly for Beth Rath. ‘What? No, that was later on.’
‘So you did see each other again, after the elevator.’
Rand raises the back of her hand to display the wedding ring. ‘Oh, yes.’
Drinion says, ‘Is there some extra information I need to understand this?’
Rand looks both distracted and annoyed. ‘Well, he didn’t die, obviously, Mr. Einstein.’
Drinion rotates his empty glass. His forehead has a definite wrinkle. ‘But you’ve spent time describing the conflict between confessing love and your real motives, and how upset and uncomfortable you were at the prospect of not seeing him again.’
‘I was seventeen, for Christ’s sake. I was a drama queen. They take me home, I look in the phone book, and he’s right there in the phone book. His apartment building was like ten minutes from my house.’
Drinion’s mouth is in the distended position of someone who wants to ask something but isn’t sure where to even start, and is signifying that facially instead of out loud.
Rand’s arm is up in some kind of signal to Beth Rath.
‘Anyway, that’s how I met him.’